Top 49 Art Definition Quotes
#1. The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.
Thomas Hoving
#2. In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things.
Slavoj Zizek
#3. I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.
Erica Jong
#4. For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.
George Saunders
#5. With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.
Virginia Postrel
#6. Definition: Alpinism is the art of going through the mountains confronting the greatest dangers with the biggest of cares. What we call art here, is the application of a knowledge to an action.
Rene Daumal
#7. Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
Lucy Grealy
#8. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.
Agnes Martin
#9. The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago ...
Thomas Hoving
#10. 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?
Edith Wharton
#11. I think the definition of an artist is not necessarily tied into excellence or talent; an artist is somebody who, if you took away their freedom to make art, would lose their mind.
Richard Price
#12. Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words.
Debasish Mridha
#13. Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.
Raphael Soyer
#14. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance ... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.
Samuel Beckett
#16. In reference to Einstein's definition of insanity...
No Mr. Einstein, that is not insanity, that is autism.
Eileen Miller
#17. The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.
Gloria Steinem
#18. With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.
Thomas Hoving
#19. Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
#20. In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness.
D.T. Max
#21. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction
Henry James
#22. When it came to the definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull - the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.
Colin Dickey
#23. Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.
Benjamin Haydon
#24. Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.
Tom Turner
#25. The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.
Ray Kroc
#26. Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.
Ani DiFranco
#27. The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.
Louis Dudek
#28. Slavery of the heart, oh Love - a prisoner of will thou art - proof that love, while blissful, can oft also be Hell. Demonstrative definition thou art, that love can be strategic as well!
Christina Engela
#29. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
#30. Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.
Ani DiFranco
#31. Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.
("Talking In The Dark")
Dennis Etchison
#32. My definition of art is whatever an artist calls art. Us speaking could be an artwork, us sitting in the near-dark in your kitchen beside the dirty dishes and smoking, me thinking of what to say next.
Matthew Brannon
#33. I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
Alistair Cooke
#34. The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition
it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind
yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
#35. Art is a song of the soul that is sung by the light of the heart with the color of emotion and appreciation.
Debasish Mridha
#36. The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.
Edwin Land
#37. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.
Ernst Haas
#38. As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what's been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge.
Sloane Crosley
#39. The heart of our karate is real fighting.There can be no proof without real fighting. Without proof there is no trust. Without trust there is no respect. This is a definition in the world of martial arts.
Mas Oyama
#40. If you want to look at a cheap shot, look at Mr. Koons's or Mr. Gober's art. By no definition is it art.
Morley Safer
#41. Relevance is a big, big question. It's more about what's your definition of being relevant. In the music world, agism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.
Larry Mullen Jr.
#42. You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.
Marcel Duchamp
#44. Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art.
Paul Di Filippo
#45. ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! ... "
Ambrose Bierce
#46. In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.
Leo Tolstoy
#48. The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.
Jacques Maritain
#49. Magick" has been defined as the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will. By this definition any willed act is a magical act. We are all magicians. We either perform our magick efficiently or inefficiently.
Christopher S. Hyatt
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