Top 100 Quotes About Public Art
#1. As Mayor, I will fully support my Arts Commission and its professional selection committees so that they can commission a full range of public art that is daring and, when appropriate, daringly traditional.
Gavin Newsom
#2. I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.
Antony Gormley
#3. If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.
Robert Graham
#4. That was the problem with public art, it risked great ridicule.
Joy Williams
#5. It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.
Dave Barry
#6. Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.
Agnes Denes
#7. Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.
Sol LeWitt
#8. Scary in the idea it could be a little overwhelming to have 70 or 100 clowns in a public space. Intriguing in that it could be something interesting. I'm up for any kind of public art.
Carole King
#9. Clothing is viral, impermanent in a way that public art cannot be. So I like thinking of how corporate-created clothing can be seen as a form of public art.
Jim Drain
#10. Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, What man does with his aloneness.
Kenneth Rexroth
#11. I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.
Barbara Kruger
#12. Public art is ephemeral by nature. Google 's new project not only catalogs an artist's work but archives it and allows people to see the art long after it has disappeared.
Shepard Fairey
#13. In my regular life, I am very involved in commissions for cities and sometimes countries. And I think of public art as a team sport. The outcome is only possible with the interaction of all the players.
Janet Echelman
#14. Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market.
Peter Landesman
#15. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
A.W. Tozer
#16. There can be no doubt that the development of a practical method of water disinfection during the last two years marks an epoch in the art of water purification.
Charles-Edward A. Winslow
#17. As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.
Tony Kushner
#18. I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.
Sally Mann
#19. Confidence and courage are special skills to the art ... Within the four walls of his study, the artist should be modest, work diligently and conscientiously. While for the public, he'll show himself audacious, yes even into cheerful boldness. And so a new public's darling has arisen.
Robert Schumann
#20. All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
Ben Shahn
#21. Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.
Simon McBurney
#22. Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public. It has to be for oneself.
Vittorio De Sica
#23. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
Antony Gormley
#24. a square is also an organism, not just a work of art and architecture [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].
Catie Marron
#25. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#26. You create a work of art. You do not know whether it will get public sanction. Sometimes outstanding films do no business, and sometimes films which are not so good work.
Dev Anand
#27. In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.
Oscar Wilde
#28. Growing up, I always had two interests and two passions; one being public service and the other being the arts and acting.
Kal Penn
#29. Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Oscar Wilde
#30. Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
Barry Commoner
#31. Public money should be spent on art but through individuals not committees.
Antony Gormley
#32. Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity - and I don't mean simple - it'll be good, and the public will know it.
John Wayne
#33. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Janet Malcolm
#34. The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair.
Robert Breault
#35. My activism has to do with my conscience; I cannot let certain things slide without doing something. My public speaking is part of an art form that is cultural.
Lee Maracle
#36. If I, as a human being and artist represent anything in the world, it is my Jewish people, and therefore Israel is the only state on our planet which I want to represent with my art and all my public activities, no matter where I live.
Evgeny Kissin
#38. Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.
Pauline Kael
#39. As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.
Leon Krier
#40. The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.
Karl Marx
#41. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
Camille Paglia
#42. I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#43. Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
Jean Cocteau
#44. Ideas matter - and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
Sam Harris
#45. In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#46. What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate.
Teresita Fernandez
#47. Philosophy and the arts are but a manifestation of the intelligible ideas that move the public mind; and thus they become visible images of the nations whence they emanate.
Lydia M. Child
#48. And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.
John Grierson
#49. I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.
Hollace M. Metzger
#50. In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.
Michael Leunig
#51. When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things ...
William Butler Yeats
#52. In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.
George Grosz
#53. 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
#54. The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing.
Bruno Munari
#56. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.
Michael Light
#57. If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings.
Thomas Sowell
#58. Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself ...
Elizabeth Janeway
#59. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Golda Meir
#60. Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.
Rokia Traore
#61. I'd been just like her, a youngster with something to say, a rebel through street art, leaving my mark on public buildings, to taunt the government and humor the public
Kenya Wright
#62. The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men, and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations.
Glenn Gould
#63. Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'
affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
Banksy
#64. All the masters have those weak points that are called masterpieces; and besides, they do them as crowd pleasers
to prove that they have the know-how.
Paul Gauguin
#65. Public relations, in this country, is the art of adapting big business to a democracy so that the people have confidence that they are being well served and at the same time the business has freedom to serve them well.
Arthur W. Page
#66. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Northrop Frye
#67. Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
Richard Eyre
#68. If art is to flourish in the twenty-first century, it must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life. It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization. It should be a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past.
Frederick Hart
#69. After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.
Jerry Saltz
#70. The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.
Robert Adams
#71. It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.
Igor Stravinsky
#72. I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.
William Lyon Phelps
#73. My reputation was built on hostility. I had no friends and some very virulent enemies in the old-guard art scene when I began. They threw their heavy artillery against me. They were convinced I was perverting the public taste.
Betty Parsons
#74. The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.
Keith Haring
#75. I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he ... Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.
Harold Bloom
#76. I think with the whole new Internet media, I'm not necessarily Internet savvy, but I just feel that the way that art in general will be presented to the public is going to be different.
Alia Shawkat
#77. To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
William Empson
#78. A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.
Martin Filler
#79. In Europe public men do resign. But here it's a lost art. You have to impeach 'em.
Will Rogers
#80. Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art.
John Walford
#81. Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.
Evan Esar
#82. In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
Camille Paglia
#83. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
Anne Enright
#84. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Walter Benjamin
#85. When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.
Spike Lee
#86. Art is the word we give to our feelings made public.
Pleasefindthis
#87. Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
#88. Believing in one's own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.
Cindy Sherman
#89. Dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.
Twyla Tharp
#90. It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.
Simone Weil
#91. An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.
Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
#93. In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.
Okakura Kakuzo
#94. Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.
Renzo Piano
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. It is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public ... should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.
Leo Steinberg
#99. I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you the things I need to. I call it art. Because art is the word we give to our feelings made public. And art doesn't worry anyone.
Pleasefindthis
#100. I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.
Charlie Munger
