Quotes on Art

In my view, the composer,_x000D_ just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter,_x000D_ is in duty bound to serve Man, the people._x000D_ He must beautify life and defend it._x000D_ He must be a citizen first and foremost,_x000D_ so that his art might consciously extol human life_x000D_ and lead man to a radiant future.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power

Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality.

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

Art means: revealing God in everything that exists.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being

I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.