Top 100 About Art Quotes
#1. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#2. That's the thing about music: It's forever. Hopefully, you captured a moment musically that has a timeless quality people will find relevant to their lives at any point. That's the whole idea about what I love about art and music.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#3. WPC Buchan might not know much about art, but she knew what gave her the fucking willies, and these things took the hairy biscuit.
Stuart MacBride
#4. I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.
William H. Hunt
#5. Men talk about art, and artists make art, but should artists talk?
Leos Carax
#6. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet ...
Jennifer Egan
#8. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
Adam Phillips
#9. I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving.
Steven Soderbergh
#10. There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
Oscar Wilde
#11. Because many of the films I've made have had an intellectualedge, it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to peoplewith money and say I don't care about art, all I care about iscommerce; all I really want to do is make money.
Paul Schrader
#12. Dear Nancy,
I love your book The Crystal Navigator. You paint beautiful imagery throughout the pages of the story, and I loved learning about art through the adventures of Lucy. I'm honored to be one of the first readers of your wonderful story,
Sincerely,
Sylvie" (11 years old)
Sylvie
#13. Anyone who doesn't know anything about art knows the name of at least one artist.
Dasha Zhukova
#14. The industry needs to be run by artists, because we are the only people that care about art.
Nikki Sixx
#15. I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.
Caio Fonseca
#16. If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.
Anthony Esolen
#17. I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.
Susan Vreeland
#18. The ones who're so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having 'auras' around them, they're usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor.
Tom Robbins
#19. I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
Peter Greenaway
#20. Nothing about art is a waste of time. It's the time wasting that gets you somewhere.
Cath Crowley
#21. Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn't "matter", that it's trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I'd write about art.
Susan Orlean
#22. The thing about art is that life is in no danger of being meaningless,
Robert Genn
#23. I do dream about art, and images come to me in dreams. I am definitely hoping to be in touch with my subconscious. I expect a call any minute.
Julian Schnabel
#24. What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.
Jonathan Lethem
#26. My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.
Floyd Skloot
#27. There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
John Updike
#28. I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.
Ice Cube
#29. The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood.
George Grosz
#30. A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#31. What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.
M.I.A.
#33. Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.
Julia Cameron
#34. One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover.
E.H. Gombrich
#35. I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.
Vincent Price
#36. But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.
Stanley Elkin
#37. If you follow the process of a thought - any thought, not just about art - the thought changes. It has to do with what you can hold in your memory and what you lose. That's an interesting thing to try to paint.
Ross Bleckner
#38. Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
Theodor Adorno
#39. To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.
Terry Teachout
#40. Many young people are still driven to art, as in olden times. Most of them are driven by their parents, who know nothing about art - only that it exists.
Elfriede Jelinek
#41. When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.
Oscar Wilde
#42. I like when people have opinions - especially about art. You can hate my art. I made my art to be hated. That's why I made the name paintings.
Josh Smith
#43. The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation.
Takeshi Kitano
#45. Chatter about art is almost always useless.
Paul Cezanne
#46. As discussed earlier, when it comes to music, most of us tend to have confidence in our taste even though we may totally lack knowledge regarding historical development or compositional theory. I frequently hear, "I don't know anything about art" but hardly ever, "I don't know anything about music".
Michael Findlay
#47. I'm very passionate about art, music, drawing, acting, so I'd like to have the chance to get the larger choice regarding acting.
Berenice Marlohe
#48. At 16, I decided to do something brave: I went on a prehistoric dig. In fact, I've had my name in a museum since I was 18 years old, not for my painting but for the prehistoric objects I found. That's how I started thinking about art.
Pierre Soulages
#49. First of all, I should preface this by the observation that artists are not the best judges of what they've done and the word definitive does not belong, in my opinion, in any conversation about art. When somebody says it's the "definitive" something, I'm always recoiling.
Nicholas Meyer
#50. Twitter has to be about art. It can't be about banal things. Banal things and art are two different worlds.
Alex Scally
#51. Art should be serious, not a joke. I don't like to laugh about art.
Gerhard Richter
#52. There are many prejudices about art, and first among them is that it is a skill and that there are definite rules.
Wolf Kahn
#53. The truth is, the more one knows about Art, the more one values Entertainment.
Jessica Zafra
#54. Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.
Tunde Adebimpe
#55. There must be something about art ... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.
Roy Lichtenstein
#56. He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
#57. The best thing about art is that it is the one luxury in life that can be enjoyed by everyone. And it lasts forever.
Lynda Resnick
#58. I'm as wrong about life as anyone, but I'm rarely wrong about art, she said.
Menna Van Praag
#59. Of course it's almost ludicrously difficult to talk about art. And about beauty. Beauty is a perversion--how can you retain your self-respect when you talk about it?
Torgny Lindgren
#60. Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.
Gustav Klimt
#61. What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.
Shawn Colvin
#62. The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
Steven Pressfield
#64. The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.
Zoe Kravitz
#65. Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#66. I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists ... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer.
Lucy R. Lippard
#67. But the business side of it, as with most creative things, there is no room for business. It is about art. It's not about marketing.
Warren Cuccurullo
#68. The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.
Hans Arp
#69. I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
#70. Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.
Camille Paglia
#71. I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.
Walt Disney
#72. For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Adam Gopnik
#73. Now, there are so many movies, so many festivals, and so many awards going on, each judged with each other, like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.
Javier Bardem
#74. People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it.
Yayoi Kusama
#75. Writing about something specific, in my mind, was overwhelming, so I wrote about art because I love art and I know I can say a couple of funny things about art.
Walter Martin
#76. Lady Gaga not a diva, and she's not crazy. She's just an incredibly nice, down-to-earth person who really cares about art and creativity. It's pretty amazing to be able to work with her. I'm pretty grateful for that.
Evan Peters
#77. You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming.
Tom Robbins
#78. Let's be happy and forget all about art and politics!
Marty Rubin
#79. When I was just getting started making my own music, my dad said, "You should think about art, but also anti-art and non-art."
Yoshi Wada
#80. As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.
Oscar Wilde
#81. People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Joe Jackson
#82. What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate.
Teresita Fernandez
#83. Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#84. The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.
Richard Prince
#85. I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#86. One of the great things about art is you get to see what your concerns are, what those things tumbling around inside you are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#87. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Walter Darby Bannard
#88. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#89. People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.
William Quigley
#90. Artists don't often know much about writing ... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.
Matthew Collings
#91. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Janet Malcolm
#92. I don't know very much about art - that has always been Pen's area - but I do believe that it is honesty at its core" -Morgan
Lauren DeStefano
#94. Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.
Peter Saul
#95. What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
Dennis Quaid
#96. People assume that artists must talk about art and beauty and the sublime whenever we get together, but no, we usually talk about money.
Christopher Bram
#97. The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.
Tom Robbins
#98. John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.
Jerry Saltz
#99. We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition - not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.
John Updike
#100. One of the things I love about art, is that it can say number of things to people. I broad hope is that it would just open people's hearts and that they would experience love, and that that would experience God.
Michael Gungor
