Top 100 Art Object Quotes
#1. Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.
Peter Wright
#3. One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.
Cindy Sherman
#4. Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
Ben Lerner
#5. Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.
Carl Andre
#6. The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
#7. Through the last few decades it [the art object] has been ripped off the wall and twisted through every conceivable permutation, yet back to the wall it insists on going.
Ashley Bickerton
#8. A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.
George Saunders
#9. No one can say I married my husband for his money. I married him because he's a beautiful art object.
Mary Fairfax
#10. Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level..
Stephen Shore
#11. The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
Annie Dillard
#12. Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#13. Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.
Claude Monet
#14. I had always spoken about the space between the art object and the person looking at it as this dynamic space, which I referred to over and over. So the idea of the space between two things was sort of interesting to me.
Robert Barry
#15. Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
W. H. Auden
#16. The scar, and her indifference to it, did something extraordinary for her, just as damage to some art object threw into relief how beautiful it had once been, tarnishing and tempering her face with the reminder of what humanity did to lovely things and how they bore it.
Ariana Franklin
#17. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#18. The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.
Jeff Koons
#19. We don't sell a watch to give time. We sell a piece of art. We sell an object that represents something to you, you know. It's like you have a nice shirt or a nice jacket. It's like a luxury accessories that can be considered like shoes or like handbags for ladies.
Ricardo Guadalupe
#20. People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure ... People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.
Leo Tolstoy
#21. A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Alexander Pope
#22. If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.
Robert Delaunay
#23. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Chris Marker
#24. The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.
Tacita Dean
#25. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from theconnection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair.
Robert Breault
#27. Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Henri Bergson
#28. Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'
Molly Crabapple
#31. The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.
Karl Marx
#32. What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
Lord Byron
#33. 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
#34. What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. I like the idea of my art being a covetable object; I like preciousness. A lot of art seems to flaunt its throw-away character ... But you have to sail out into the dangerous sea of fine art with these crafted works.
Grayson Perry
#36. Judo should be free as art and science from any external influences, political, national, racial, and financial or any other organized interest. And all things connected with it should be directed to its ultimate object, the benefit of Humanity
Kano Jigoro
#37. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
A.S. Byatt
#38. Victory is the main object in war.
Sun Tzu
#39. Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#40. I wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object.
Marcel Duchamp
#41. Where are you, my little object of art? I am here to collect you.
Pepe
#42. A half finished shawl left on the coffee table isn't a mess; it's an object of art.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
#43. The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti
#44. The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#45. The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#46. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Walter Pater
#47. Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.
Terry Teachout
#48. The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.
Tennessee Williams
#49. Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life ... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.
Jean Anouilh
#50. A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
Marcel Proust
#51. What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#52. The sole object of Logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts: the communication of those thoughts to others falls under the consideration of Rhetoric, in the large sense in which that art was conceived by the ancients; or of the still more extensive art of Education.
John Stuart Mill
#53. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
James Joyce
#54. I am giving soul and functionality to art by implementing her in to daily objects by through out design
Baris Gencel
#55. A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson
#56. The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form.
Francois Delsarte
#57. The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.
Peter Schjeldahl
#58. And, moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces everything connected with it, from its greatest object, the state, to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#59. I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.
Martin Mull
#60. Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be. The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion; talent is the gift of conveying that emotion
James Joyce
#61. I don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon.
Elia Suleiman
#62. Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.
Jean Anouilh
#63. The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri
#64. Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.
Joseph Campbell
#65. Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.
Josef Albers
#67. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#68. 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
#69. When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.
Samuel Beckett
#70. 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.
Paul Cezanne
#71. Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don't actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn't the object?
Rainbow Rowell
#72. Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#73. Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness ... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object.
D.H. Lawrence
#74. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
#75. The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.
A.A. Gill
#76. More than any expert Irene had met, Mr. Simms mastered the intricacies of dealing in art. He understood an object's worth, not solely its dollar value but how that value could be manipulated into emotional currency.
Kim Fay
#77. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
#78. A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone ... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.
Hans Arp
#79. Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.
Rollo May
#80. Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").
Kazimir Malevich
#81. Art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
Oscar Wilde
#82. Seek to make your work a prayer, your believing an act, your living an art. It is then that the object of your faith will be made visible to you. It is then that you shall 'kiss the lips of your desire.'
Ernest Holmes
#83. The secret principle of martial arts is not vanquishing the attacker, but resolving to avoid an encounter before its occurrence. To become an object of an attack is an indication that there was an opening in one's guard, and the important thing is to be on guard at all times.
Gichin Funakoshi
#84. ... it often occurs that a work of art - even though incomprehensible - remains in the mind, and produces its effect years later, when people are apt to remark that it was not the same as when they first saw it, transferring to the object under discussion the chance in themselves.
Walter Pach
#85. It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted ...
Joshua Reynolds
#86. Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
David Foster Wallace
#87. The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,
that is the secret of the fine arts.
Joseph Joubert
#88. Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.
Georges Braque
#89. When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
Marc Chagall
#90. Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
Brian Eno
#91. Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.
Jerry Saltz
#92. The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.
Joshua Reynolds
#93. Genuine art . . . does not have as its object a mere transitory game. Its serious purpose is not merely to translate the human being into a momentary dream of freedom, but actually to MAKE him free.
Friedrich Schiller
#94. Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.
Arnold Aronson
#95. The idea is more important than the object.
Damien Hirst
#96. I like that feeling when you're making art, that you're taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.
Kiki Smith
#97. When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard. The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.
Emile Chartier
#98. At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#99. The idle wife ranked with the ornamentally wrought weapon and with the splendid offering to the gods as a measure of the man's power to waste, and therefore his superiority over other men ... As is the case with any other object of art, her uselessness is her use.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#100. A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought ... but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.
Niccolo Machiavelli
