“People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it.”
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.
“I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.”
“People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it.”
“Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.”
“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.”
“Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.”
“To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.”
“There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”
“At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.”
“I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.”
“When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.”
“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.”
“Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.”
“You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”