Art

"My job is to make art expensive."

"I make the whole world answer to my art."

"What do we do when things are hard to describe? We start by sketching out the roughest shapes to serves as scaffolds for the rest; it does not matter very much if some of those forms turn out partially wrong. Next, draw details to give these skeletons more life-like flesh. Last, in the final filling-in, discard whatever first ideas no longer fit. ...Until you've seen some of the rest, you can't make sense of any part."

"Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do."

"This sudden importance of art—an importance discovered by ideological movements, by the State, and by the business world—has made the artist a central figure on the public place. His earlier revolt against society, his marginal role as an entertainer, have of course predestined him to the role of an ally of all progressive movements that promise a universal society, that is, a universal public for his books, poems, paintings and partitions. His shudder before the ugliness of capitalist civilization, his isolation from the masses whose warmth and understanding he genuinely needs, make him an ideal, because uncritical, partner of the progressive ideologues who preach the overthrow of all that he hates."

"We are all heirs to the loveliness of the visible world; but only by process of art can we be inducted into possession of this large estate. Some authentic poet or artist has to intervene and give the property its rights and empower it to attain perfection in our sight."

"The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians."

"Annie Besant’s book where she put forward the idea that theosophical mystical energies could be portrayed as colours or abstract shapes was practically the invention of abstract art. A lot of artists rushed out and read it and suddenly thought, ‘oh God you could, you could portray love as a colour, or depression as a colour” All of a sudden abstract art happens, a flowering out of occultism."

"I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it."

"I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that."

"Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist."

"Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct."

"The heart desires, The hand refrains, The Godhead fires, The soul attains."

"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction."

"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."

"One... characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval chronicler mentions the King... it is sometimes difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caeser or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. ...the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art... in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage."

"Once the major wants of mankind are satisfied by the machine process, our factory system must be on a basis of regular annual replacement instead of progressive expansion—not on a basis of premature replacement through debauched workmanship, adulterated materials, and grossly stimulated caprice. "The case," as Mr. J. A. Hobson again puts it, "is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such a variety enables him to utilize a larger proportion of the aggregate matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, which we call Art, we pass outside the limit of matter and are no longer slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns." In other words: a genuine standard, once the vital physical wants are satisfied, tends to change the plane of consumption and therefore to limit, in a considerable degree, the extent of further mechanical enterprise."

"I do not believe in art which is not the compulsive result of humanity's urge to open its heart."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw."

"Art allows you to imbue the truth with a sort of magic, so it can infiltrate the psyches of more people, including those who don't believe the same things as you."

"Muriel Rukeyser unspools one of the most passionate arguments I've ever read for the notion that art creates meeting places, that poetry creates democracy."

"If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who specialize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe."

"Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life…"

"If it is a dying craft we can't do anything about it. Civilisation moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era."

"When you have a cause, the best way to express yourself is artistically."

"The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events."

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."

"I have this very what you call today "square" idea that art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness."

"Technique without art is shallow and doomed. Art without technique is insulting."

"I make art because it centers me in my body, and by doing so I hope to offer that experience to someone else."

"The arts are a wonderful medicine for the soul."

"Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important."

"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."

"Art is made by the alone for the alone."

"Scientific pictures are often not just about science. They may... have an undeniable aesthetic quality. They may even have been primarily works of art that possess a scientific message."

"Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable."

"Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!"

"Importantly, in Europe the question of art has been inscribed into religious pictures since the Renaissance. Here the rise of art marked a turning point in the history of images which is foundational for art history. Pictures not only carried the names of artists, but displayed their personal views on religion. The practice of art began without a fixed concept of art. But it developed specific evidence that distinguishes works of art. The notion of art emerged in the heart of the religious picture, with the themes still remaining the same. In an evolving market, personal artistic style became a brand in its own right. In the French writings of the time, “art” is introduced with the term “science”, while “art” refers to craft. The concept of Poesia, used much later by Titian when referring to his own pictures with mythological subjects, had hitherto been the privilege of poets. Giovanni Bellini defended the “bella fantasia” against the expectations of his patrons, thereby initiating the era of art collections."

"Henry Letham: Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure."

"Thus Orpheus, arguably the most prevalent symbol for Art in the Western world, shows us both the power and limitations of the whole venture. Yes, it might feel like you’re conquering death when you play that song, paint that picture, compose that poem, or type that story. Yes, you might experience the sensation of escaping the everyday world, perhaps even your own mortality, upon hearing, watching, and reading the best artistic examples. But the feeling is illusory, Orpheus tells us. The feeling is, after all, just a feeling."

"Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."

"There abides in nature a certain form of matter which, being discovered and brought by art to perfection, converts to itself, proportionally, all imperfect bodies that it touches. ...It rested on the indisputable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing themselves in chemical operations, without either beginning or end."

"No work of art is worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier."

"Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade, Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade."

"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."

"Art...has always been a polite form of terrorism."

"Art that matters creates a context of meaning which draws on the most basic experiences of being in a world that makes, albeit transient, sense. Such experiences can be of the kind which children have that determine their subsequent responses to the world, which we have when gripped by a natural scene of great beauty, or when we experience the world in a way which makes new sense by falling in love. The difficulty of modern art is in this respect a reflection of the extent to which such experiences have become lost, neglected, repressed, or commodified in many areas of modern society, and so need new ways of being articulated and expressed.... [But] If what is aimed for in both art and philosophy is a wholesale critical response to the totalizing nature of the commodified world, the danger is that they will mirror what they oppose."

"Major art does involve a kind of rightness which reveals what is wrong with art which does not possess this rightness. Aesthetic flaws in this sort of situation are akin to logical flaws, because it can be shown why they are not right in the context in which they occur."

"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."