Top 93 Art Objects Quotes
#1. Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right.
Woody Allen
#2. Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
Vik Muniz
#3. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.
Charles Simic
#4. There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
Rachel Cusk
#5. 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
#6. When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
W. H. Auden
#7. People think, "Wow, people in America have so much money, they're sending hundreds of pencils to this guy." I don't think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces.
David Rees
#8. I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.
Ian Frazier
#9. Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.
Tim Crouch
#10. Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture.
Arne Glimcher
#11. I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#13. The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.
Wassily Kandinsky
#14. Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination.
Charles Negre
#15. If you can make art with sound, can't you make music with objects?
John Zorn
#16. I make big objects that are simple, bright and clear, kind of ironic but hopefully funny because I love the shapes, and I get inspiration from toys and books, and I believe in art for everyone.
Florentijn Hofman
#17. Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.
Gilles Deleuze
#18. 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
#19. Anything can be art. Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between objects.
Joseph Kosuth
#20. Yangi, a philosopher, art historian and poet, had evolved a theory of why some objects - pots, baskets, cloth made by unknown craftsmen - were so beautiful. In his view, they expressed unconscious beauty because they had been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego.
Edmund De Waal
#21. Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.
Antony Gormley
#22. I would have artists be convinced that the supreme skill and art in painting consists in knowing how to use black and white ... because it is light and shade that make objects appear in relief.
Leon Battista Alberti
#23. For me, meaning of design is to give soul to objects by Art. Art sometimes need to be in every part of daily life, not only in the galleries and museums.
Baris Gencel
#24. The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.
Roman Jakobson
#25. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.
Wynn Bullock
#26. All of us alive today are or can be its prey, most of all the person who believes he is creating works of art when he is in fact creating mere kitsch objects.
Gillo Dorfles
#27. No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."
Edmund Snow Carpenter
#28. We at BMW do not build cars as consumer objects, just to drive from A to B. We build mobile works of art.
Chris Bangle
#29. I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects.
Arman
#30. We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.
Kenneth Clark
#31. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
John Berger
#32. I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
Piet Mondrian
#33. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
Robert Smithson
#34. Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they're social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That's the goal.
Graham Moore
#36. For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.
Robert Motherwell
#37. Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.
Gustave Courbet
#38. Men, not only in Turkish society but everywhere, have been the bosses in terms of creation. If you look at art history, women were the objects. The fact that it's not been made by women means that the subjects are not women.
Deniz Gamze Erguven
#39. What sets 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' apart is Riggs's use of 'found' photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. 'Found' describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.
Claire Cameron
#40. To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.
Alexander Calder
#41. The spider's lesson is never to be greedy. It shows that objects of necessity can be objects of beauty and art as well. The spider teaches us that we can be too easily enraptured with ourselves.
Marlo Morgan
#42. Whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it, as soon as you are aware of it, it will vanish. If you remain for a long period forgetful of objects, you will naturally become unified. This is the essential art of zazen.32
Yi Wu Taigen Leighton
#43. Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.
Trevor Paglen
#44. Have you ever taken a good look at a public garbage can in Paris, a paving stone in Rio de Janeiro, or a doorway in Dublin? Trust me -- the man or woman responsible for making those utilitarian objects was creating art.
Shawn Coyne
#45. The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences
William Whewell
#46. I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#47. I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the '80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!
Sam Taylor-Wood
#48. There are people who speculate at objects. I don't think that makes them evil or not evil. It doesn't matter; in order to speculate, it has to be made public. Once it's made public, it's functioned is art.
Lawrence Weiner
#49. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
#50. We were astonished by the beauty and refinement of the art displayed by the objects surpassing all we could have imagined - the impression was overwhelming.
Howard Carter
#51. People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?
Ai Weiwei
#52. I'm interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades.
Martin Puryear
#54. I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
Bernard Berenson
#55. Where are you, my little object of art? I am here to collect you.
Pepe
#56. Dirty Freds ... I love this filthy old place. I love the dust and the dirt, the crappy old books and the objects of art.
Alan C. Martin
#57. Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.
Joan Miro
#58. 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
#59. Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.
Robert K. Wittman
#60. Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
Marcel Proust
#61. Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.
Jerry Saltz
#62. Learning to live healthily with the objects in our lives is an art.
Denise Marie Mari
#63. Every art and every faculty contemplates certain things as its principal objects.
Epictetus
#64. The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.
Russell Lynes
#65. A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#66. But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
#67. Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its 'manner,' in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself.
Paul Claudel
#68. Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action.
Kristine Stiles
#69. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.
Clive Bell
#70. Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.
John F. Kennedy
#71. Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.
Eugenio Montale
#72. Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Donald Knuth
#73. I'm not in the luxury-goods business. I sell unique objects. I wish I was in luxury goods because then I could just call the factory and say, 'I need 10,000 more of whatever.' But I can't - because then it's not art, it's something else.
Larry Gagosian
#74. I live with the things that I love: art, furniture, and objects that I have collected throughout my travels.
Lisa Marie Presley
#75. Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
Roy Ascott
#76. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, food, chairs, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists ...
Allan Kaprow
#77. The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
Jean Cocteau
#78. Most art in the world does not have a capital 'A,' but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions.
Gloria Steinem
#79. The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone.
C.S. Lewis
#80. Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.
Josef Albers
#81. Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
Rene Magritte
#82. High standards generally
about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else
far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
Joseph Epstein
#83. Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster
#84. Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.
Anish Kapoor
#85. I sometimes am challenged to imagine where the timbre of art should be. Should it be about objects that point to this current moment, or how objects are related to ideas of this current moment?
Theaster Gates
#86. Better rooms better furniture, better objects d'art can only be created for a society interested in living - not existing.
Van Day Truex
#87. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
Jeff Koons
#89. I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills.
Sharon Creech
#90. Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?
Frank Lloyd Wright
#91. Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects.
Elizabeth Goudge
#92. I am giving soul and functionality to art by implementing her in to daily objects by through out design
Baris Gencel
#93. What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain De Botton
