W. H. Auden - Art Quotes

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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

W. H. Auden
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

W. H. Auden
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.

W. H. Auden
Healing,
Papa would tell me,
'is not a science,
but the intuitive art of wooing Nature.'

W. H. Auden
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.

W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think.
Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

W. H. Auden
Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.

W. H. Auden
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

W. H. Auden
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

W. H. Auden
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

W. H. Auden
It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

W. H. Auden