ART QUOTES III
quotations about art
The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
STEFAN ZWEIG
prelude, Paul Verlaine
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
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
Art is memory's mise-en-scene.
LUIS BARRAGÁN
The Architecture of Luis Barragán
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 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
Like most art students, I expect I'll find that there is no demand for what I've learned so I'll teach other students so that one day they can teach as well.
GUY BELLAMY
The Secret Lemonade Drinker
We live in a world full of urgent problems: climate change, terrorism and poverty, to name but three. We won't resolve them with brawn; they are obstacles we can only overcome by using our brains--when we are thinking like artists and not behaving like animals.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
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
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
TONI MORRISON
Sula
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
I do get students that initially think they're never going to be that good an artist. I refuse to accept that. There's trained and untrained. It's OK for you to be working on your own level -- as long as you're working.
ROBERT LEMMING
"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016
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
If you are not passionate in life, you can't be passionate in art.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
True art consists in the concealment of art.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
We are all artists. We just have to believe it.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
The artist does not really create; he discovers.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
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