Top 100 Art Value Quotes
#1. I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
Bernard Berenson
#2. A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it ...
Andre Breton
#3. The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
Susan Vreeland
#4. Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
Susan Sontag
#5. If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?
Sara Sheridan
#6. It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.
Frank Miller
#7. There is, literally and figuratively, not a gold standard. That's almost as big a problem in art as in the financial world. How do you affix a value to something that only has value because a certain number of people agree to believe in that value?
John Currin
#8. Believe your life has value and you are here for a purpose. What that purpose is, is your life's work.
Art Hochberg
#9. One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T. S. Eliot
#11. Art is a communication informing man of his own dignity, and of the value of his life, whether in joy or grief, whether in laughter or indignation, beauty or terror ... Man needs the comfort of his own dignity ... And that's what the artisf is for. To give him that comfort.
Robert Nathan
#12. Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.
Pietro Aretino
#13. Life is art Layla. Not everyone can appreciate it, not everyone cherishes it, and not everyone understands its value.
Nevien Shaabneh
#14. Most cowgirls are natural storytellers, their art honed by years of practice ... It serves as entertainment; it also preserves the humor and value of a unique way of life.
Teresa Jordan
#15. The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.
Joseph Kosuth
#16. I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
Marvin Harris
#17. The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
Wyndham Lewis
#18. In medicine, as in art, the value of any piece of information is often related to its rarity.
Tim Benson
#19. I choose films for their artistic value. I don't need a mansion or a Jaguar. When I leave this Earth, I won't take any money with me. All I will leave behind will be my art.
Brad Renfro
#20. Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#21. I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.
Selima Hill
#22. The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.
T.J. Clark
#23. To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.
Robert Musil
#24. Sometimes you don't get the value of the art or the painting you buy. The value you get from it is on the wall and you're looking at it. It's the same with your car. You're using it, so it goes down in value but you've used it.
Lemar
#25. Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.
Ryszard Legutko
#26. Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable ... they give the idea of a whole.
Joshua Reynolds
#27. Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#28. In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#29. I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.
Francis Ford Coppola
#30. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
Pope Paul VI
#31. One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, 'Don't get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.
Chris Ware
#32. Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.
George Steiner
#33. The art market does represent a sort of hyper-capitalism: it produces added value without any actual work being done.
Thomas Koerfer
#34. We use important words too frequently and they lose value; for instance, charm and great. An actor or musician often is proclaimedgreat when we really mean he is outstanding.
Eleanor Robson Belmont
#35. Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Paul Theroux
#36. Art is like a butterfly fluttering in a meadow. Analysis of art is like a butterfly on a pin. Each has its value, but we must always be aware of the difference, and what is gained or lost.
Walter Darby Bannard
#37. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C.S. Lewis
#38. A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.
Ernst Junger
#39. I think there should be a reworking of the value structure of art. The value is when the artist makes a first engagement with society. That work has the most value. That is the function of the artist. That result.
Lawrence Weiner
#40. What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is it the only value passing time as comfortably as possible?
John Green
#41. For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so; happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which separately and of themselves have little value, but which united with art form a graceful design.
Delphine De Girardin
#42. I've learnt from experience that a painting isn't finished when you put down your brush - that's when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.
Banksy
#43. Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
Jessie Burton
#44. [A person's] utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.
David Hume
#45. 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
#46. It's a shame when other people's gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it's too expensive to be interesting or moving. That's when I get bummed out.
Nate Lowman
#47. The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.
W. Eugene Smith
#48. Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.
John Guare
#49. Old wives' tales - that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
Angela Carter
#50. The complete and definitive work of art is created beyond one's individuality ... The universal transcends such a level. Mere spontaneity has never created a work of art which possesses a lasting cultural value. The method leading to universal form is based upon calculations of measure and number.
Theo Van Doesburg
#51. I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having an alternate value.
Daniel Pinchbeck
#52. The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill.
Amit Kalantri
#53. The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.
RZA
#54. In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.
Andre Malraux
#55. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#56. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
Freya Stark
#57. All art is an expression and extension of ourselves.. Art finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#59. The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
Seth Godin
#60. For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
Robert Pinsky
#61. The value of art, in Strict Father morality, lies either in its moral value, its entertainment value, its economic value, or its value as a success symbol - a sign of belonging to an elite. All
George Lakoff
#62. Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.
Jennifer Chiaverini
#64. I value above all the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically, without answers. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful.
April Gornik
#66. Where art is concerned, it is the process of creating - exploring, discovering, and experimenting
that has the greatest value. Through self-expression and creativity, children's skills will develop naturally, and their ability to create will soar.
MaryAnn F. Kohl
#67. The value of the creative faculty derives from the fact that faculty is the primary mark of man. To deprive man of its exercise is to reduce him to subhumanity.
Eric Gill
#68. I think President Obama really does get the value of the arts.
Herb Alpert
#69. Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.
Robert Henri
#70. What happens when you combine your passion, strength and value? This is the process of creating true art.
J.R. Rim
#71. I regard it as a waste of time to think only of selling: one forgets one's art and exaggerates one's value.
Camille Pissarro
#72. The value of time, that is of being a little ahead of your opponent, often provides greater advantage than superior numbers or greater resources.
Sun Tzu
#73. Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
Karen Armstrong
#74. The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.
Edward Hopper
#75. The real value of art is not always revealed by the price set upon it.
Jeffrey Loria
#76. The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.
Denis Dutton
#77. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.
Madeleine L'Engle
#78. The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
Camille Paglia
#79. The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.
John Berger
#80. Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.
W. Somerset Maugham
#81. We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies.
Okakura Kakuzo
#82. In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.
Edgard Varese
#83. I think in the Western world we have gotten overly identified with doing, and we've kind of forgotten about the art of being. And we don't see value in it; we think that if you're not doing something all of the time, being very active and producing something, then you're sort of wasting your time.
Shakti Gawain
#84. Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
#85. For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#86. It's funny how something so normal and mundane that you see every day-your body-can be controversial. The shock value is intense. It's like carrying an art piece around with you all the time.
Beth Ditto
#87. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#88. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#89. When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
Roger Scruton
#90. To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm ... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.
Georges Braque
#91. Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run.
Wendell Berry
#92. Perhaps an eternal law of art is that, for everything discovered, something of value is forgotten.
Jan Swafford
#93. Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#94. To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.
Thomas A. Edison
#95. The current climate doesn't represent a threat to the production of art but to the market. I think it's time for artists to get over auction houses, galleries, and high-production-value exhibitions and start using our voices again.
Maurizio Cattelan
#96. All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value.
Charles Gates Jr.
#97. To help others to develop and succeed in life is a reward itself and only has value when nothing is expected in return.
Choi Hong Hi
#98. Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Northrop Frye
#99. The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.
Odilon Redon
#100. Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
Immanuel Kant
