Art Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form—or else it is not art.

What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow. Where are such signs and works? How do we recognize the genuine ones? Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times... The present isolation of the rare, genuine artist is absolutely unavoidable for the moment... This fact leads us to the idea that we are standing today at the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion - a period in which great and traditional ideas died and new and unexpected ones took their place.

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

Alfred de Vigny

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

Claes Oldenburg

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... Advanced art today is no longer a cause – it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Benjamin Jowett

"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

With Dada I … have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power, To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alon-it's much more general, a basic political attitude. It's a clear intention, more necessary today than ever, to oppose all forms of force emanating from a managing, centralising political power.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of

Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more. A pure studio art is unfruitful and frail, for anything that does not form living roots — why should it exist at all?

Käthe Kollwitz

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

George Edward Woodberry

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds, and few go beyond them.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.

Gwendolyn Brooks