ART QUOTES III
quotations about art
Art is a language that doesn't need to be translated.
AHMAD HARIRI
"How art is helping Syrian refugees keep their culture alive", The Guardian, March 2, 2016
If you are not passionate in life, you can't be passionate in art.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
C. S. LEWIS
On Stories and Other Essays in Literature
Art as Magic is a forbidden and illegitimate pleasure, and ... what we are ashamed of wanting most are our wishful apprehensions. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. Apart, that is, from the artist.
ADAM PHILLIPS
On Balance
The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
STEFAN ZWEIG
prelude, Paul Verlaine
True art consists in the concealment of art.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.
DANA SPIOTTA
Innocents and Others
Art is becoming one of the indispensable factors influencing the organization of everyday life. It is present everywhere and nowhere. It is becoming a fluid. It stands outside all professions. It cannot be isolated, it cannot be worshipped, it cannot be converted into money. None of this is possible. It is irreversibly dissolved in the solution of burgeoning human existence.
MILAN KNIZAK
"Aktual Univerzity: Ten Lessons", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The way to art was not to think too clearly, not to plan things out, but to follow where your heart and emotions led.
PAUL PARK
A Princess of Roumania
While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
RAY BRADBURY
preface, Zen in the Art of Writing
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA
"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Mammoth Hunters
Art should have political, spiritual, and surprising elements. It should try to find new language of communicating in order to give awareness to the public. Then every society can use the layer it needs at the moment. If one is interested in the political, they can take that. If the next one needs spiritual, it can be found in the same work. So if you just did one level, for example only political, it's like an old newspaper, you read it today and tomorrow it's old news. The art dies. Art with this kind of complexity has many lives where many societies can take something different at different times. It can live for centuries, otherwise who cares?
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine
Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?