Art Quotes

"I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary"

Barbara Kruger, Artist

"The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever"

Bruce Beresford, Director

"We do this for the art, not the adulation. I'd rather our music get liked and we get ignored. I don't want to be adored for anything other than the music"

Andy Partridge, Musician

"Broadway has changed tremendously from the early days when the shows were referred to as musical comedies. Musical Theater is now a more expanded art form. Back then, singer/actors were not the norm. From the 60's to now, it is necessary to do it all to be a consummate Broadway performer"

Betty Buckley, Actress

"I regard it as a waste of time to think only of selling: one forgets one's art and exaggerates one's value"

Camille Pissarro, Artist

"What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become"

Bruce Nauman, Sculptor

"You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same"

Chuck Close, Artist

"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?"

Egon Schiele, Artist

"Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art"

Adolf Loos, Architect

"But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that"

Bryan Ferry, Musician

"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him"

Chinua Achebe, Writer

"Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk"

Billy Idol, Musician

"Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?"

Alexander Theroux, Novelist

"Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time"

Camille Pissarro, Artist

"What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque"

Corin Nemec, Actor

"Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious"

Corin Nemec, Actor

"It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played"

Conrad Veidt, Actor

"I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment"

Beverly Sills, Musician

"I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free"

David Lloyd, Artist

"Providence School of Art students used to sneak into P Funk concerts"

Bernie Worrell, Musician

"Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways"

Barbara Kruger, Artist

"Art does imitate life, it has to come from somewhere. To put boundaries and limitations on it doesn't make a lot of sense to me"

Christian Slater, Actor

"Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art"

Adolf Loos, Architect

"For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art"

Avery Brundage, Athlete

"Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do"

Arthur Boyd, Artist

"What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love"

Lady Gaga, Musician

"If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it"

Andrew Denton, Comedian

"I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through"

Bill Budge, Businessman

"Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt"

Alex North, Composer

"For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art"

Edvard Munch, Painter

"This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution"

Edvard Munch, Painter

"I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way"

Lady Gaga, Musician

"Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world"

Lady Gaga, Musician

"Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium"

Henry Rollins, Musician

"When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist"

Bill Griffith, Cartoonist

"Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr"

Bill Griffith, Cartoonist

"To help, to continually help and share, that is the sum of all knowledge; that is the meaning of art"

Eleonora Duse, Actress

"Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

"Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting"

Elizabeth Bowen, Novelist

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