Quotes on Works Of Art

It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

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?

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them-in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. The do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

Mystery is the essential element of every work of art.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

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.

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.

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

In architecture it isn't enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. [] I like and respect Brasí­lia very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasí­lia

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.