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Art

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“Living in a system under the Communist ideology, an artist cannot avoid fighting for freedom of expression. You always have to be aware that art is not only a self-expression but a demonstration of human rights and dignity. To express yourself freely, a right as personal as it is, has always been difficult, given the political situation.”
Ai Weiwei (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.”
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art.”
Robert Pinsky (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.”
Karel Appel (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.”
Albert Camus (1913–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”
Henry Miller (1891–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
Henry Miller (1891–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work "comes" to him.”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is the child of Nature; yes, Her darling child, in whom we trace The features of the mother's face, Her aspect and her attitude, All her majestic loveliness Chastened and softened and subdued Into a more attractive grace, And with a human sense imbued. He is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) said by 1882 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twenty-four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)
“Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn't care where it is ... the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.”
William Faulkner (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 487
“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 (1809–1849) said by 1849 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ron Rosenbaum: Why are you doing what you're doing? Bob Dylan: [Pause] Because I don't know anything else to do. I'm good at it. Ron Rosenbaum: How would you describe "it"? Bob Dylan: I'm an artist. I try to create art.”
Bob Dylan (born 1941) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Playboy Interview (1978)
“I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.”
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) said by 1959 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. ... Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”
Henry James (1843–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can't do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sloan [American colleague artist who started his art by making etchings, c. 1920] not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things with a truer and fresher eye than most..The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.”
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) said by 1967 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: 'Joan Sloan' Hopper', p. 172; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 39
“If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it’s not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.”
Marilyn Manson (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. … Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.”
Václav Havel (1936–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Newsweek (16 May 1955) Variant translation: Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
“lf l am not mistaken, the words "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.”
M. C. Escher (1898–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this — that 'objectification' is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.”
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 118
“Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.”
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) said by 1966 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in: 'Hans Hofmann' by Cynthia Goodman, in Portfolio (January - February 1981), p. 47
“Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist.”
Camille Paglia (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man is a complete wackadoo, but so is every great actor who ever lived. You gotta separate the artist from his/her art, or you won't be able to enjoy anything.”
Brian K. Vaughan (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”
George Steiner (1929–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.”
Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: He's got the whole world in his hands, The Telegraph (24 March 2007)
“Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair — holding his wrists like Lifar — and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.”
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) said by 1965 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”
Toni Morrison (1931–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Replying to Listeners", broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).
“Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive persons to violence — the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all — drive the artist to create. He is by nature our archrebel. … the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life.”
Rollo May (1909–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.”
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) said by 1944 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.”
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, by Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 206
“Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient', contained in the work.”
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of 'ready-mades' to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my 'ready-mades' against such contamination.”
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I admit, that the commonplace man can never, by copying, produce a masterpiece; he notes every detail but he does not really see - the artist penetrates below the surface into the very heart of nature; for him everything is beautiful because beauty in art consists of character.”
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) said by 1917 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances. But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.”
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) said by 1917 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hofmann is perhaps the most difficult artist alive-difficult to grasp and to appreciate. But by the same token he is an immensely interesting, original, and rewarding one, whose troubles in clarifying his art stem in large part precisely from the fact that he has so much to say.”
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Hans Hofmann, in "Hofmann", in Georges (Fall 1961)
“Art has a harmony which parallels that of nature. The people who tell you that the artist is always inferior to nature are idiots! He is parallel to it. Unless, of course, he deliberately intervenes. His whole aim must be silence. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget.. .And then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive plate of his being.”
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) said by 1906 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source