Top 75 Popular Art Quotes
#1. The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
Jacques Barzun
#2. That our popular art forms have become so obsessed with sex has turned the U.S.A into a nation of hobbledehoys; as if grown people don't have more vital concerns, such as taxes, inflation, dirty politics, earning a living, getting an education, or keeping out of jail.
Anita Loos
#3. All literature and popular art contain themes that resonate with the audience.
Daniel Lambert
#4. Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
Margaret Atwood
#5. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
Pauline Kael
#6. Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.
Jessica Helfand
#7. Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
Northrop Frye
#8. What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
W. H. Auden
#9. The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.
Hector Tobar
#10. 'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.
Steve Erickson
#11. I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.
Kelly McGillis
#12. I think that high art reposes on popular art, without one there cannot be another.
Eric Rohmer
#13. In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
Brad Holland
#14. Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.
Bill Watterson
#15. The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?
Stephen Sondheim
#16. I think that its an artist's responsibility to have a point of view. Society takes its cue from popular art. People need something to look to, something to provoke them into questioning whether they completely hate something or completely love something.
Madonna Ciccone
#17. You desire a popular art? Begin by having a "people" whose minds are liberated, a people not crushed by misery and ceaseless toil, not brutalized by every superstition and every fanaticism, a people of itself, and victor in the fight that is being waged today.
Romain Rolland
#18. I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
Sydney Pollack
#19. You're only popular with anorexia.
Tori Amos
#20. The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.
Bruce Beresford
#21. We're more popular than Jesus Christ now.
John Lennon
#22. Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.
Donald Richie
#23. The art world is never going to be popular like the NFL, but more people are buying art and I think that's cushioning, to a great extent, our art-market cycles.
Larry Gagosian
#24. And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#25. Discuss unto me: art thou officer, Or art thou base, common, and popular?
William Shakespeare
#26. In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#27. I find pop art really offensive because it's taking a piece of popular culture and putting it somewhere where people can't see it.
Rebecca Sugar
#28. In general the parallel between the popular uses of music and of pictures is close enough. Both consist of 'using' rather than 'receiving'. Both rush hastily forward to do things with the work of art instead of waiting for it to do something to them.
C.S. Lewis
#29. In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.
Jennifer Chiaverini
#31. The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#32. Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
Noam Chomsky
#33. The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.
Barry Humphries
#34. Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#35. Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.
Walter Darby Bannard
#36. Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
Oscar Wilde
#37. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
Kim Gordon
#38. You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.
Alfredo Kraus
#39. Intelligent media companies strive to provide both intellectual and comedy programs, groundbreaking and reflective articles, art house and popular movies. Not to be open minded in providing a full range of quality media would be a failure to serve the breadth and depth of the communities we live in.
Lachlan Murdoch
#40. Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.
Jerry Saltz
#41. [W]e have reason to ask what artists are working specially for children, and whether they are running with the popular tide or saying something special.... In America, we had the 'parlor gift book' makers, but we also had Howard Pyle.
Louise Seaman Bechtel
#42. Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.
Aleksandra Mir
#43. Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.
Camille Paglia
#44. Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille Paglia
#45. I feel that the music that I do is somewhat of a lost art and it's not as popular as dance or pop music and people are not as interested in it. But it's something that I believe in and I feel that it's needed, so that's why I do it and I will keep doing it until everybody hears it and gets it.
Jazmine Sullivan
#46. He, in his love songs, and his tales in prose,
was without peer
and if fools claim Limoges
produced a better, there are always those
who measure worth by popular acclaim,
ignoring principles of art and reason
to base their judgments on the author's name.
Dante Alighieri
#47. As soon as street art got popular, I was just like, 'I'm out of here.'
Barry McGee
#48. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#49. I think that from the very beginning it wasn't simply, what made Playboy so popular was not simply the naked ladies, what made the magazine so popular was, there was a point of view in the magazine, that you couldn't run nude pictures without some kind of rational that they were art.
Hugh Hefner
#50. If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.
Mark Edward
#51. The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.
Andrew Hoberek
#52. It's not like I think my art is inspirations from icons strung together. They're just sort of people who others talk about. I am definitely interested in the masters of different genres, they're talented and popular for a reason.
Lana Del Rey
#53. Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Oscar Wilde
#54. Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated? Clearly. And
Plato
#55. I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.
William Monahan
#56. Opera is an exclusive art form, so it cannot be that popular. I just do what I love to do.
Anna Netrebko
#57. The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.
Scott Kahn
#58. Popular men, They must create strange monsters, and then quell them, To make their arts seem something.
Ben Jonson
#59. Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
V.S. Pritchett
#60. We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular - popular culture.
Jeffrey Deitch
#61. Once you decide that it is the art that is important and not how popular and well received you are, you no longer have an albatross.
Stephen Stills
#62. Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it's a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.
Sol Luckman
#63. Art cannot be looked at as an elite, sacred event anymore. It has to be embraced as an accessible, popular form, which is what I believe theater is at its roots.
Diane Paulus
#64. With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
Sydney Pollack
#65. To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong.
Woody Allen
#66. At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.
David Puttnam
#67. A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.
Jacob Bronowski
#69. It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.
Jeanette Winterson
#70. We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
#71. Evanescence fans aren't the popular kids in school. They aren't the cheerleaders. It's the art kids and the nerds and the kids who grow up to be the most interesting creative people.
Amy Lee
#72. The 'low' quality of many American films, and of much American popular culture, induces many art lovers to support cultural protectionism. Few people wish to see the cultural diversity of the world disappear under a wave of American market dominance.
Tyler Cowen
#73. There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.
Ron Brackin
#74. Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.
Rudolf Arnheim
#75. In the history of a soul's evolution there is a critical point of the human incarnation that decides for us whether we stay there, go down or progress upwards. There is a knot of worldly desires impeding us; cut the knot by mastering desires and go forward. This done, progress is assured.
Virchand Gandhi
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