ART QUOTES VII

quotations about art

Art quote

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But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

RUDOLF ARNHEIM
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Visual Thinking


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The work of art is a scapegoat surplus product, a dispensable cliche of form and meaning, having only the value the spectator--the symbol of society at large--gives it as he encounters it in the no man's land of the gallery or museum. He victimizes it and is victimized by it; he is ambivalent about it as it is in itself. It has a certain amount of authority, yet no more than he gives it by channeling his life-energy in its forms. In other words, it forces him to recognize his own authoritarian style, i.e., his tendency to treat his own identity as a finished form, but at the same time possessed of an energy that contradicts that form by reaching for other identities. The work of art teaches the spectator that he too is communal cliche and unfinished expression.

DONALD BURTON KUSPIT

Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries


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Tags: Donald Burton Kuspit


I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.

SAUL BELLOW

The Paris Review, winter 1966


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Tags: Saul Bellow, chaos


There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity


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Tags: Rebecca West, mobs


Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

DONALD BARTHELME

"On the Level of Desire"


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Tags: Donald Barthelme


Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.

BAKER BROWNELL

Art Is Action


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Tags: Baker Brownell


Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Art Objects


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Tags: Jeanette Winterson


All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil


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Tags: William Butler Yeats


Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Killing Yourself to Live


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Tags: love


Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet


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Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, criticism


Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

THOMAS MERTON

No Man Is an Island


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Tags: Thomas Merton


Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.

LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON

Speak


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Tags: emotion


Art is made by the alone for the alone.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

attributed, The Architects' Journal, 1976


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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

MARY OLIVER

The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992


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Tags: Mary Oliver, imagination


I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction -- you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Language of the Night


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Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion


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Tags: Dan Simmons, artists


The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

WILLIAM JAMES

letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899


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Tags: William James


Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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Tags: Austin O'Malley


What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

HONORE DE BALZAC

Lost Illusions


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Tags: Honore de Balzac, Nature


One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.

ROBERT LEMMING

"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016


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