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.
“Rules and models destroy genius and art.”
“Becoming emancipated at 14, my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school, so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company, Flower Films, and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30, I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography, and I want to take an art history class.”
“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
“One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.”
“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
“The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.”
“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
“Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can't provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.”
“Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!”
“I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.”
“In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.”
“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.”
“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”
“The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.”
“In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.”