Art Quotations | Page 6

I've stopped going to see art films because every critic gives them four stars and say things like 'masterpiece,' 'spellbinding' and 'mesmerizing.' I mean, they're doing that with my film, but I don't want to use those blurbs. Critical reviews aren't worth too much anymore because just about every film can get one or two of them.

Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

I have long accepted that an art fair is not a perfectly curated museum show. Instead, it's more like a brightly lit bazaar, where art is haggled over and handled like any other commodity.

I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, but I do play the banjo.

I have a pretty expanded view of what art is. I include pop music and even some sports.

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

I always thought it would be a great thing to do an art carwash. So you can actually go and get your car washed, but while you're sitting around waiting you can walk in that hallway where you look at the cars going through the window, and that could be changing exhibitions.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It's a weird combination of elements.

In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist.

Providence School of Art students used to sneak into P Funk concerts.

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution.

Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the given material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time - the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.

I like writing letters and receiving letters. It's a shame that we've lost the art of letter-writing and saving correspondence. I mourn that.

I was going to school thinking I was going to do something entirely different, thought acting was just a hobby at that point, met Stanley Kubrick and was like, 'Whoa, this can be an art form, and you can really move people the way you do simply by acting.'

Balance is key. Balance is a virtue. Balance is next to godliness, maybe. We should all aspire to better balance. Too much of what is said in this world is one-sided, and we need more balance - in our speech, in our music, in our art, in everything.

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place.

Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.

My parents always got a kick out of my art. I was always able to make them laugh. As I got older, I remember the thrill I got when I graduated from making my classmates laugh to making adults laugh. Kind of a watershed moment.

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.

There's obviously nothing wrong with selling your art - only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it's confusing to know how far you should take it.

I guess some fans like art and get it, others are just into the music, don't really turn up and have an opinion. The fans that have shown interest are all with me all the way.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

I know that I am an excellent live performer. I know that I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what it is I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade. They get a two-hour show, sometimes a three-hour show, for a decent price.

Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.

It's a good note for any young hopeful in this business to take: study up and make sure you are informed at all times because knowing how to anticipate someone's subtle nuances in a performance will only elevate your own art!

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

An art book is a museum without walls.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

Inspiration comes from everywhere: books, art, people on the street. It is an interior process for me.

What liberals mean by 'goose-stepping' or 'ethnic cleansing' is generally something along the lines of 'eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.' But they can't say that, or people would realize they're crazy.

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change it can not only move us, it makes us move.

Art imitates life. It's definitely helpful to feel that way. You feel that way when you're leading a show and you're on a set.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

Unfortunately, music devolved instead of evolved. The music business got into the hands of lawyers and accountants rather than the entrepreneurial creative people, and that's when the beginning of the end started. It's all based on money instead of art and creativity.

Romance can end, but I don't think art really ends, as romantic as that might sound.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something thats never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Broadway has changed tremendously from the early days when the shows were referred to as musical comedies. Musical Theater is now a more expanded art form. Back then, singer/actors were not the norm. From the 60's to now, it is necessary to do it all to be a consummate Broadway performer.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art.

The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.

You wouldn't have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Melbourne, where I grew up, is one of the street art capitals of the world. Something about discovering freshly painted walls always fills me with optimism; it's autonomous and democratic, and reminds me that maybe people are paying attention after all.

Tackling, and that ability to stay on your feet and pressurise a player, is a dying art.

Practice makes an actor excel. It is like cycling and motor driving. It is an art, which can be learnt and practised.

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

Love-making is an art which must be studied.

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn't there, I don't.

Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

The art of life is to live in the present moment, and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God Himself.

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase - a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it.

Movies are immortal art - the first new art since Greek drama.

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.