ART QUOTES IX
quotations about art
Creating our own art is scary. We sensitive peeps have set some pretty high standards for ourself. We fear we are not good enough at it. How can we get the multitude of ideas in our head on a sheet of paper? All we can see is how flawed it will be.
ESTHER DE CHARON DE SAINT GERMAIN
"Why Art Is Important for Highly Sensitive Persons", Huffington Post, March 15, 2016
Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
BERTOLT BRECHT
attributed, Decade of Protest
You're an artist ... that means you see the world in ways that other people don't. It's your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn't make you crazy--just different. There's nothing wrong with being different.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
interview, NPR, Jul. 12, 1974
Art functions pyramidally: all new achievements are based on the utilization of everything that has been accumulated below, at the foundations of the pyramid. Revolutions do not occur here; this field, more than any other, is governed by evolution. And we must know what has been done before us in the field of verbal art. This does not mean that you must follow in trodden paths: you must contribute something of your own. A work of art is of value only when it is original, both in content and in form. But in order to leap upward, it is necessary to take off from the ground. It is essential that there be a ground.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Psychology of Creative Work
Life is art's rival and vice versa.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Art is a way of knowing what it is we actually believe.
PAT. B. ALLEN
Art Is a Way of Knowing
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Philosophy of Modern Music
The history of art is the history of revivals.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note Books
I want to meet a guy named Art. I'd take him to a museum, hang him on the wall, criticize him, and leave.
JAROD KINTZ
I Want
Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music
Art is a vehicle that allows us to transcend linear time, to travel backward and forward into personal and transpersonal history, into possibilities that weren't realized and those that might be.
PAT B. ALLEN
introduction, Art Is a Spiritual Path
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
I think it would be a good stunt to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we miss.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
The Trail of the Hawk
To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Aesthetic Theory
Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.
DAVID SEDARIS
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
ROBERT HENRI
"With preparation, making art is inevitable", Press of Atlantic City, March 8, 2016
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?