Art

"Striving for excellence is a virtue, but not all of us can be Michelangelo. Yet the point of art isn’t to be legendary, but to bring meaning and joy to ourselves and our community."

"Art hath an enemy called Ignorance."

"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end."

"A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness."

"Most historians of science, when they mention Kaluza's work at all, say that the idea of the fifth dimension was a bolt out of the blue, totally unexpected and original. ...But their amazement is probably due to their unfamiliarity with the nonscientific work of the mystics, literati, and avante garde. ...because of Hinton, Zollner, and others, the possible existence of higher dimensions was probably the single most popular quasi-scientific idea circulating within the arts. ...the work of Riemann pollinated the world of arts and letters via Hinton and Zollner, and then probably cross-pollinated back into the world of science through the work of Kaluza."

"The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths."

"When the world would sink under your feet, art shall remain the sole island on which you will stand."

"Through art we make tomorrow better."

"All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting."

"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."

"Through the music speaks a truth about art that Wells does not understand, but that I hope to: that art doesn’t have to deliver a message in order to say something important. That art isn’t always a means to an end but sometimes an end in itself. That art may not be able to change the world, but it can still change the moment."

"After she died, they kind of just came like vultures. ... Like, artists wanted pieces of her."

"We tend to shy away from that grief,” she explains. “But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world."

"Nieuwerkerke's replacement did not give Manet and the painters of the any... cause for cheer. Under the Third Republic... in November 1870 ... became Director of Fine Arts. ...Blanc had published a biography of Ingres, whom he idealized... and for several decades [Blanc] had been the most prolific and articulate exponent of the sort of celebrated at the . In his lofty conception of art, Eve was the original representative of beauty, but by plucking the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge she had plunged the world into a... sort of Platonic world of appearances in which the ideal was obscured by the humdrum and ugly material world. ...[T]he ability to see through the veil of appearances... was "obscure, latent, and sleeping" among the majority of men. However, great artists— ...especially Ingres and the painters of the —"carry within themselves this idea of the beautiful in a state of light." The true mission of art was... to show the "idea of the beautiful" that concealed itself behind the flickering shadows of the fallen world. ...[A]rt should not portray nature... but should idealize it... [H]e was vehemently opposed to Realism and paintings of la vie moderne, believing that artists who imitated nature and everyday life were slaves to appearance."

"Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealist."

"Most artists are surrealists. … always dreaming something and then they paint it."

"We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?"

"The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation."

"“Art starts out simple. Pale. True to what is real. Like stone statues of the human body, or verse chanted by firelight. Pale, pale stone. Pale as straw. Simple words, that name what is true. Designs in natural wool, the color of rams’ horns. Then, as time goes on, the design becomes more elaborate. The colors brighter. The story twisted to fit rhyme, or symbol, or somebody else’s power. Finally, the designs are so elaborate, so twisted with motion, and the colors so feverish—look at me, Ludie—that the original, as it exists in nature, looks puny and withered. The original has lost all power to move us, replaced by a hectic simulacrum that bears only a tainted relation to what is real. The corruption is complete.”"

"Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced."

"Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us."

"Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous."

"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling."

"Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature."

"Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator."

"Art, like dreaming, is something so necessary to internal balance that people deprived of it go a little wacky. Art is the collective dreamplace, the reservoir of our deepest understandings and desires and hopes, as essential as water. In recognition of this fact, the marketplace offers us entertainment, hoping to replace the wild and forested interior of our souls with potted plastic plants. Just as we dream-whether we want to or not, whether we long for or fear our dreaming-people make art and are drawn to art."

"Every vital social movement immediately begins to generate art-songs, poetry, posters, murals, novels-an outpouring of the creativity that people will create from even the smallest crumbs of hope."

"In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect — its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions — its purpose being pleasure. A work of Art must of course indirectly appeal to the Intellect, and a work of Science will also indirectly appeal to the Feelings; nevertheless a poem on the stars and a treatise on astronomy have distinct aims and distinct methods. But having recognised the broadly-marked differences, we are called upon to ascertain the underlying resemblances. Logic and Imagination belong equally to both. It is only because men have been attracted by the differences that they have overlooked the not less important affinities."

"Eminem: I tried to show you art, but you just pick it apart."

"All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area."

"Art is long, and time is fleeting."

"Art is Power."

"The counterfeit and counterpart Of Nature reproduced in art."

"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."

"The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.'"

"The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side. … After a long period of gazing (during which he may occasionally squint his eyes), he will approach to within a few inches of the picture and examine the brushwork; he will then return to his former distant position, give the picture another glance and walk away."

"Gideon: I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. ...I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think..."

"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much."

"The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival."

"Art ... can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order."

"Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice."

"Comics they say are not literature--adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds. Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons?"

"If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs."

"You can think of art as framed deviance."

"Art indeed is long, but life is short."

"Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence."

"Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?"

"Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity — reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel — Art."

"For Art is Nature made by Man To Man the interpreter of God."