ART QUOTES XII
quotations about art
It is difficult to prove that any age has been propitious for the artist; Socrates was condemned to death, so were Seneca and Petronius, Dante was exiled, the age of Louis XIV was one of both civil and religious persecution; the nineteenth century, as the lawsuits against Flaubert, Baudelaire, Hugo, etc., show, was not much better; and in the twentieth century there are whole tracts of Europe where to be a writer is to invite a firing-squad. "Silence, exile, and cunning" are the artist's lot, and, exquisite though his happiness will be when his public, educated at last, mobs him like a film-star, we may be wiser to assume that, for our lifetime, "silence, exile, and cunning" it will remain.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Condemned Playground
Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Back to Methuselah
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
ROBERT ALTMAN
interview with F. Anthony Macklin, 1976
They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers--people who do now know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
AUGUST WILSON
The Paris Review, Winter 1999
Art never expresses anything but itself.
OSCAR WILDE
The Decay of Lying
Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative.
LUCAS SAMARAS
"Another Autointerview", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Art achieves all little things by absolute truth: but all her great things need some admixture of illusion.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
interview, SF Site, Apr. 2001
The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modeling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Massachusetts Review, Summer, 1987
Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry
There's no art where there's no fee.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010