“I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.”
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.
“The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.”
“I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.”
“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.”
“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.”
“A picture is a poem without words.”
“Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.”
“Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.”
“Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.”
“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.”
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
“When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.”
“Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.”
“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”
“The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.”
“I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.”
“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.”