Art Aesthetic Quotes

#1. Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...

Theodor Adorno

#2. The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.

Barry Humphries

#3. A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Marcel Proust

#4. No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.

Milan Kundera

#5. In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

Edward De Bono

#6. If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#7. The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.

Patrick Swift

#8. 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

#9. About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.

Max Walker

#10. We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.

Asger Jorn

#11. After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Jerry Saltz

#12. The aesthetic principle is the same in every art, only the material differs.

Robert Schumann

#13. In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

Ada Louise Huxtable

#14. Art is a true aesthetic synthesis , "a priori" of feeling and image in the intuition, as to which it may be repeated that feeling without image is blind, and image without feeling is void.

Benedetto Croce

#15. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs

George Orwell

#16. To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

George Herbert Mead

#17. The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you're present in the current moment; when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Ken Robinson

#18. [New Mexico is] the only landscape . . . where Nature is as aesthetic as Art; the only landscape that can compete with the great painters.

Leo Stein

#19. When one studies the structure of the universe, it becomes clear that the sciences are as aesthetic as the arts, and the arts are as practical as the sciences. Thus, they are different - but the same.

Edward J. Fraughton

#20. Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.

Amit Chaudhuri

#21. To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.

John Gardner

#22. We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.

Mason Cooley

#23. Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.

Christopher Caudwell

#24. Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

Jerry Saltz

#25. If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.

Piet Mondrian

#26. Art is aesthetic communication of the soul - in fact, it's the best of that communication - and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature.

Anthony Marais

#27. Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire.

Nell Zink

#28. Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#29. Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Clive Bell

#30. Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

Milan Kundera

#31. Fashion, for me, is anything that's aesthetic and beautiful. Art, food, film. It's something that I appreciate and really like.

St. Vincent

#32. I always loved fashion and clothes. Not because I think that's a woman's place, but because I care about aesthetics. I like art; I like going to art museums, and to me, these things are just manifestations of one's aesthetic sense.

Leila Janah

#33. Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.

Luis Barragan

#34. Just as physical laws apply to Christians and non-Christians alike (Matthew 5:45), the laws of art apply universally. Aesthetic principles, no less than scientific principles, are grounded in the created order and are a manifestation of God's design.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#35. A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.

Francine Prose

#36. I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

Amy Tan

#37. How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion's aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.

Coco Rocha

#38. Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

Daniel Levitin

#39. It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art ... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.

Clement Greenberg

#40. I don't get really inspired the way some people do, buzzing with ideas - it feels like hard work to me ... but once I get hooked into the universe of a particular work it becomes almost like an aesthetic addiction.

Shaun Tan

#41. Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

Robert Nozick

#42. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

Susan Sontag

#43. My intention, certainly, is to create something which is aesthetic but many things are implicit in the work that I do. For me photography is writing, it is history; it can be aesthetic, it can be many things though it does not have to be art.

Graciela Iturbide

#44. I'm kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one: "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art."

Lidia Yuknavitch

#45. In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Clarice Lispector

#46. The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the door of the spirit.

Sri Aurobindo

#47. One of the staples of discussion about basic aesthetic principles is that art has to exist for its own self and cannot be prostituted to advance any particular cause or point of view. Perfect nonsense, of course, but that doesn't keep it from being repeated ad nauseam.

Douglas Wilson

#48. Just because something causes you to have a feeling of aesthetic beauty does not make it a work of art.

Fred Ross

#49. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.

Daniel Bell

#50. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.

Lucy Soutter

#51. All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Walter Benjamin

#52. What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.

Victor Pinchuk

#53. Nature supplies the game of chess with its implements; science with its system; art with its aesthetic arrangement of its problems; and God endows it with its blessed power of making people happy.

Peter Weiss

#54. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

William H Gass

#55. Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

Anthony Burgess

#56. It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.

Terry Teachout

#57. A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.

John Desmond Bernal

#58. Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

Chaim Potok

#59. Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.

Lawrence Weiner

#60. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.

John Lanchester

#61. The Ilan-Lael Foundation is an arts education foundation celebrating nature and the aesthetic of the built environment for its ability to help us see ourselves and our world in new ways.

James T. Hubbell

#62. What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

Hans Hofmann

#63. For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.

Pierre Soulages

#64. Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express?

Lewis Foreman Day

#65. There's a lesbian aesthetic, just as there's gay camp, but I don't know if there's such a thing as 'lesbian art.'

Catherine Opie

#66. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?

Franz Grillparzer

#67. Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and ... it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis De Bernieres

#68. I love deeply and admire the beauties of life and its expression in many different art forms. I am an aesthetic philosopher.

Debasish Mridha

#69. I was a screenwriting and studio art major in college, so even though I don't have any training as a floral designer, I have a very particular visual aesthetic.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#70. I'd forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn't afford.

Chris Offutt

#71. A game may be as integral to a culture, as true an object of human aesthetic appreciation, as admirable a product of creativity as a folk art or a style of music; and, as such, it is quite as worthy of study.

Michael Dummett

#72. Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

William S. Burroughs

#73. I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.

Jerry Saltz

#74. For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#75. The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites,

Eli Siegel

#76. The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.

Freeman Dyson

#77. The Art Deco movement, architecture from that period and sort of the industrial aesthetic from that period. Art Deco meets tribal kind of thing. All that is my primal inspiration.

Pamela Love

#78. Perhaps the ideal life is that of the week-end artist, who preserves the integrity of his own aesthetic ideals because of his economic independence ... If his daily grind is hateful he has his weekly solace in art.

Walter J. Phillips

#79. All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Susan Sontag

#80. Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

Remy De Gourmont

#81. So long as painting deals with objective nature, it is an impure art, for recognizability precludes the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting, ancient or modern, moves us aesthetically only in so far as it possesses a force over and beyond its aspect.

Lawren Harris

#82. Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

Roger Kimball

#83. The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Clive Bell

#84. Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.

Robert Greene

#85. Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.

Andre Bazin

#86. In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Fredric Jameson

#87. It was a nasty paradox: he had developed an aesthetic that drew him to significant art, but that same sensibility made him realize he could never do anything remotely significant.

Will Chancellor

#88. Aesthetic life is not something sophisticated - that's a humanistic lie. Aesthetic life is as integral to being human as building sandcastles on the beach and giving your children names.

Calvin Seerveld

#89. Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.

Harold Rosenberg

#90. Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

#91. Don't ask me my opinions on art, because I don't have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my "palette". I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating.

Luis Bunuel

#92. Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator.

Amedeo Modigliani