Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

What is art but a way of seeing?

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Art is science made clear.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it "joy"?

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizons; deep-cheated locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

All art is quite useless.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.