Quotes About Definition Of Art

#1. My definition of art is whatever an artist calls art. Us speaking could be an artwork, us sitting in the near-dark in your kitchen beside the dirty dishes and smoking, me thinking of what to say next.

Matthew Brannon

#2. The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

Louis Dudek

#3. Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.

Vladimir Nabokov

#4. The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

Gloria Steinem

#5. The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.

Thomas Hoving

#6. Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.

Raphael Soyer

#7. The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago ...

Thomas Hoving

#8. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

Agnes Martin

#9. With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.

Virginia Postrel

#10. For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

George Saunders

#11. In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Leo Tolstoy

#12. Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art.

Paul Di Filippo

#13. I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

Erica Jong

#14. The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way.

Ray Kroc

#15. Definition: Alpinism is the art of going through the mountains confronting the greatest dangers with the biggest of cares. What we call art here, is the application of a knowledge to an action.

Rene Daumal

#16. Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

Lucy Grealy

#17. Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

#18. I think the definition of an artist is not necessarily tied into excellence or talent; an artist is somebody who, if you took away their freedom to make art, would lose their mind.

Richard Price

#19. Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words.

Debasish Mridha

#20. My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance ... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

Samuel Beckett

#21. In reference to Einstein's definition of insanity...
No Mr. Einstein, that is not insanity, that is autism.

Eileen Miller

#22. Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.

Art Spiegelman

#23. With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

Thomas Hoving

#24. 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

#25. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction

Henry James

#26. When it came to the definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull - the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.

Colin Dickey

#27. Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.

Tom Turner

#28. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.

G.K. Chesterton

#29. Magick" has been defined as the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will. By this definition any willed act is a magical act. We are all magicians. We either perform our magick efficiently or inefficiently.

Christopher S. Hyatt

#30. The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.

Jacques Maritain

#31. Art is what appeals to the a priori.

Raheel Farooq

#32. ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! ... "

Ambrose Bierce

#33. You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

Marcel Duchamp

#34. Relevance is a big, big question. It's more about what's your definition of being relevant. In the music world, agism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.

Larry Mullen Jr.

#35. The heart of our karate is real fighting.There can be no proof without real fighting. Without proof there is no trust. Without trust there is no respect. This is a definition in the world of martial arts.

Mas Oyama

#36. Is photography art? ... The pure definition of the word 'art' alone is too vague today to break one's brain and soul about it. Let us take a little vacation from this word.

Ernst Haas

#37. The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.

Edwin Land

#38. Art is a song of the soul that is sung by the light of the heart with the color of emotion and appreciation.

Debasish Mridha

#39. The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition
it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind
yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

William James

#40. I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Alistair Cooke

#41. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Alfred North Whitehead

#42. Slavery of the heart, oh Love - a prisoner of will thou art - proof that love, while blissful, can oft also be Hell. Demonstrative definition thou art, that love can be strategic as well!

Christina Engela

#43. As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what's been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge.

Sloane Crosley