Quotes on Art

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint.

Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters.

In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

All good art is an indiscretion.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.

Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning.