Top 100 Be Art Quotes
#1. The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. Forster
#3. People think a big camera and big lighting will make art, and I want to break that rule. If you have a great concept, it can be art.
Nikki S. Lee
#4. I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.
Nathan Myhrvold
#5. Art as language ... in the future there will only be art. This common language will carry the message of love.
Theo Van Doesburg
#6. Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.
Allan Sekula
#7. Anything can be art. Anything can be self-expression . Now you take the weapon and run with it.
Gerard Way
#8. I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to BE art.
Carrie Fisher
#9. Art can no longer be art today if it does not reach into the heart of our present culture and work transformatively within it that is, an art which cannot mould society - and through this naturally operate upon the core questions of our society - is not art.
Joseph Beuys
#10. The moment you try to institutionalize art, it ceases to be art.
Allen Wier
#11. Some believe that art is the imitation of nature; in fact, nature is so sublime that it cannot be imitated. However noble it may be, art cannot perform a single one of the miracles of nature. And besides, why imitate nature when it can be perceived by all those endowed with senses?
Kahlil Gibran
#12. Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
D.H. Lawrence
#13. When I speak about freedom, it's about freedom of the spirit. Freedom of the spirit can't be represented by a body. It has to be art. It has to be all the colors. It has to be something that moves and has no boundaries.
Salma Hayek
#14. The art of tomorrow will be a collective treasure, or it will not be art at all.
Victor Vasarely
#15. Styles be fat like Jackie Gleason, the rest be Art Carney.
Phife Dawg
#16. Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art ...
Robert Henri
#17. Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.
Swami Vivekananda
#18. Food can be expressive and therefore food can be art.
Grant Achatz
#19. I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.
Roy Lichtenstein
#20. Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show ... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.
Richard Phillips
#22. You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.
Seth Godin
#23. I coined this term 'freedom thru limitation' back in the '90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring 'anything can be art' theory.
Billy Childish
#24. Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.
Duane Michals
#26. Any work aspiring to be art however humble should carry its justification in every line.
Joseph Conrad
#27. Anything can be art: painting stairs, raising a child, or organising a trip to the end of the world. It's the way you live that makes you either an artist, or an art connoisseur, or an unsatisfied critic.
Mykyta Isagulov
#28. Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.
Donald Barthelme
#30. If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.
Chris Abani
#31. What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art ... From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.
Bruce Nauman
#32. It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!
Amanda Palmer
#33. People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.
Mason Cooley
#35. Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.
Thomas Hoving
#36. One physiological precondition is indispensible for there to be art: intoxication, or the feeling of fullness and increasing strenth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#39. Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
C.S. Lewis
#40. You don't make movies to be art movies. You make movies that move you emotionally because if you're going to commit five years of your life to a movie, you need something to keep you going.
Saul Zaentz
#41. Everything will be art and nothing will be art, because everything, as I believe, already is.
Andy Warhol
#42. I wanted not to make photographs that would be art, but art that would be photography.
Jean-Marc Bustamante
#43. I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.
Michel Onfray
#44. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
Ayn Rand
#45. I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.
Kailash Kher
#46. When people do something extraordinarily well, it's self-evident. It could be art. It could be a circus, whatever it is, where people are doing incredible things. It's self-evident. You know that it's beautiful. You know that it's very difficult, but it looks easy.
Gabe Polsky
#47. Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.
Nicholas Sparks
#48. If I don't understand it, it must be art.
Bono
#49. Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.
Roger Ebert
#50. If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. There seems to be art and creativity everywhere, whether it was in the galleries of Jaffa or along the streets of Jerusalem ... the creativity blows my mind because you can see that people want to live their lives to the fullest.
Guillermo Diaz
#52. I think music can definitely be art; I also think music can be crap and not be art.
Kathleen Hanna
#53. He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.
Katherine Paterson
#54. Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
Jeff Lemire
#55. If the whole is to be Art, the parts must not try to be.
Del Close
#56. Anything can be art. Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between objects.
Joseph Kosuth
#57. I start by thinking I'm going to make use of all possibilities without troubling any longer about problems when something starts to be art. I don't make the ETERNAL work of ART, I only give visual information.
Jan Dibbets
#58. 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
#59. I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.
Kahlil Gibran
#60. There can't be art without risk. It's like saying No Sex, and then expecting there to be children.
Francis Ford Coppola
#61. If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.
Bruce Nauman
#62. Usually, when we talk about creativity, it's about self-expression, which is great, but for work to be art or design, there has to be someone on the other end. The audience makes the work come alive.
Austin Kleon
#63. My work is always a ready-made ... cultural, political, or social, and also it could be art - to make people re-look at what we have done, its original position, to create new possibilities.
Ai Weiwei
#64. Even now it is ceasing to be art of the nobleman, and it is quite possible that some day one may find it so common and even vulgar that, along with all party literature and journalism, one would classify it as prostitution of the spirit.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. 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
#67. How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art? Theoretically,
Jade Chang
#68. Every person is able to add beauty, whether by growing flowers, or singing, or cooking luscious meals, or raising sweet pets. Every part of life can be art.
Cynthia Rylant
#69. babe, it must be art
Bono
#70. Games can be art, and they can be significant and all the glorified things that we want them to be. But if you ask a kid if their toys are important, they'll say 'yes,' and 'Please don't take them away.'
Kim Swift
#71. A story works when there's momentum, life behind the words. Some stories have this and others don't, and it's difficult to say why this is. If all stories "worked," though, writing wouldn't be much of a challenge; it wouldn't be art.
Mary J. Miller
#72. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.
Paul Rand
#74. I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.
Steve Martin
#75. Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.
Walter Darby Bannard
#77. What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
Jodi Picoult
#78. Like any great art, the culture of hip-hop has changed with the times. With the state of technology, music is more accessible and freely exchanged. For hip-hop to grow while keeping a sense of integrity, the essence of the culture has to be handed down and respected like any high form of art.
One9
#79. In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.
Lafcadio Hearn
#80. Art is just a series of natural gestures. For God's sake, don't try to be artistic - all wild animals walk the same way.
John Marin
#81. It appears to be monumental only because it's art.
Christo
#83. I wanted to open the dialogue about race in ballet and bring more people in. It's just beautiful to see the interest that has exploded for such an incredible art form that I will forever be grateful to!
Misty Copeland
#84. The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.
Andrea Dworkin
#85. Maybe in any art you have to be wholly you in the context of whatever you're doing.
Mariel Hemingway
#86. I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating ... anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.
Steven Soderbergh
#87. I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.
Julian Schnabel
#88. Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.
Kathleen Hanna
#89. Make your life your art. It doesn't have to be that you're an artist. I know I talk about art a lot, but I mean a very broad thing with that. You could be a veterinarian, that's your art. Find your art; find your thing you love.
Gerard Way
#90. Your parents will die before you do, so you'd better make your own life decisions. Your own choices are always good if you know yourself - especially in art, because whenever you do something new, everyone will be against you.
Yoshitaka Amano
#91. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased
the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Raymond Chandler
#92. It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.
Paul Simonon
#93. I ... practiced all the arts of apology, evasion, and invisibility, to which procrastinators must sooner or later be reduced.
Maria Edgeworth
#94. How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.
Kermit The Frog
#95. You can choose to be mad in a negative
way where it fuels you to do
mean, hateful things, or you can let
your madness fuel your art and
channel it in a positive way.
Allie Gonino
#96. It's not communism, it's shouldn't be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It's our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the best people.
Amy Poehler
#97. It is the rule in war, if ten times the enemy's strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, be able to divide them; if equal, engage them; if fewer, be able to evade them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.
Sun Tzu
#98. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
Francois Truffaut
#99. Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.
There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
#100. Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it's not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it - a work of art.
Lawrence Halprin
