Works Of Art Quotes - Page 10

• The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Art, Ideas

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• Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Lying

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

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• Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card.

  Max Euwe

  Art, Home, Men

  "Why You Lose at Chess". Book by Fred Reinfeld (p. 180), 1956.

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• Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Country, Art

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, New Directions Publishing

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• Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Art, Past, Long

  D. H. Lawrence, Simonetta de Filippis (2002). “Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays”, p.33, Cambridge University Press

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• Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Beautiful, Art

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• No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Disappointment, Book

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• Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

  Michel Foucault

  Time, Art, Madness

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.273, Psychology Press

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• Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

  Marcel Proust

  Depression, Art, Thinking

  Le Cote de Guermantes (The GuermantesWay) pt. 1 (1921). George Seldes, The Great Thoughts, quotes Ramon Guthrie: "This passage was meant to show what fools people who are capable of uttering such idiocies are... . It is slap-stick irony that Proust puts into the mouth of a fool (Boulbon) in order to show what a fool he was."

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• The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

  Lewis Mumford

  Running, Art, Nature

  "The Culture of Cities". Book by Lewis Mumford. Introduction, 1938.

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• All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Mirrors, Diversity

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.6, First Avenue Editions

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• My intention was to create a work of art which would transcend the visible, which cannot be perceived except in stages, with the understanding that it is a partial revelation and not the perpetuation of the existing. My aim is to show what can be seen within the limits of possibility which exists in the midst of coming into being.

  Yaacov Agam

  Art, Understanding, Limits

  Yaacov Agam, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1980). “Homage to Yaacov Agam: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition, 1980”, Book Sales

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• I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

  Edward G. Robinson

  Art, Painting, Found

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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  A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Art, Essentials, Doe

  Leonard Bernstein (2007). “The Infinite Variety of Music”, p.141, Amadeus Press

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• Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

  Man Ray

  Art, Mind, Doe

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• We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Cutting, Perfection

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• Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavour in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts.

  Lawren Harris

  Country, Art, Real

  "The best of the Group of Seven".

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• My body is a gradual work of art

  Rick Genest

  Art, Body

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• Conversations...begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I'm using the word 'conversation' not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Art, Stress, Ideas

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• In architecture it isn't enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. [] I like and respect Brasí­lia very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasí­lia

  Oscar Niemeyer

  Beautiful, Art, Simple

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• A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist’s responsibility, but I don’t agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Responsibility, Self

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• A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art

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• Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms...
  Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.

  Joseph Beuys

  Art, Men, Creative

  Interview in "Artforum" Magazine, November 1969; as quoted in "Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972" by Lucy R. Lippard, University of California Press, (p. 121), 1973.

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• Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

  Joseph Beuys

  Art, Order, Social

  Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (1979). “Joseph Beuys”

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• A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

  Alfred Brendel

  Art, Soul, Breasts

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