“Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.”
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 people who make art their business are mostly imposters.”
“Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.”
“Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.”
“The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.”
“Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.”
“Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”
“I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”
“Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.”
“Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.”
“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”
“The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.”
“Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.”
“I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.”
“She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.”
“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”
“It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.”