Art quotes
22.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside art — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living."
"The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences."
"In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences."
"The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched."
"Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself."
"We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down."
"A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all."
"The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness."
"The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer."
"The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias."
"Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable."
"[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated."
"Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions."
"Art is seduction, not rape."
"Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made."
"Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."
"Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are."
"Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it."
"As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art."
"In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."
