Art Quotes

Art refuses to sit still or be easily defined, and the best quotes about it do the same. Here you will find painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers wrestling with creativity, beauty, meaning, and the maddening gap between what you imagine and what you manage to make.

“Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.”

Charles Baudelaire

More Art Quotes

“Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.”

Malcolm Forbes

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

William James

“I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.”

Conrad Hall

“The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.”

Jerry Saltz

“Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.”

Friedrich Schiller

“Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.”

Jerry Saltz

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.”

John Ruskin

“There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.”

Ansel Adams

“A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.”

Jerry Saltz

Other Categories

View all →