Quotes About The Function Of Art

#1. The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#2. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

#3. The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it's to imagine what is possible.

Bell Hooks

#4. No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'.

Rosalind E. Krauss

#5. The function of art is to struggle against obligation.

Amedeo Modigliani

#6. The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Constantin Brancusi

#7. The function of art is to make people like life more than they do.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#8. The function of art is to free the spirit of man and to invigorate and enlarge his vision.

Katherine Sophie Dreier

#9. The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.

John Cage

#10. The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

Edward Albee

#11. It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Joseph Campbell

#12. The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.

Georges Braque

#13. So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'

Simon McBurney

#14. Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.

Joseph Campbell

#15. The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.

Gertrude Stein

#16. ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough - see point one.

Douglas Adams

#17. Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

Derek Walcott

#18. The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.

Erma Bombeck

#19. At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze.

Jennifer Birkett

#20. The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

Roman Jakobson

#21. The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
McLuhan CD-ROM

Marshall McLuhan

#22. I admire Ai Weiwei for his art and his activism. His art is beautiful in form, and in function embodies the principles of populism and social consciousness I aspire to in my own practice.

Shepard Fairey

#23. The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

Gertrude Atherton

#24. To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

E. M. Forster

#25. 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

#26. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

D.H. Lawrence

#27. Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the artshave broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.

Jane Heap

#28. The ultimate function of art is to make men do what they want to do, as it is to make them recognize what they know.

Maurice Blondel

#29. The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.

Ron Silliman

#30. A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Beverly Sills

#31. The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

John Dewey

#32. The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

Roman Jakobson

#33. To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.

Joseph Campbell

#34. Every piece of art is a mirror and serves the function of reflectivity to expose to you and reveal to you more of who you are.

Darryl Anka

#35. The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature ... the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

H.L. Mencken

#36. The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.

Howard Brenton

#37. Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Mary McCarthy

#38. How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

Albert Einstein

#39. Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

Clement Greenberg

#40. Today, because photography exercises such a profound influence upon the study of art, we tend to disregard the way in which prints continue to function as information.

Edward Lucie-Smith

#41. Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.

Jeanette Winterson

#42. It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Herbert Read

#43. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Aristotle.

#44. Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and ... it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis De Bernieres

#45. The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

Tacita Dean

#46. The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible.

Jean Dubuffet

#47. An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred.

Peter London

#48. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.

Anonymous

#49. Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake.

Antony Gormley

#50. Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

Heinrich Heine

#51. The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula.

Aristotle.

#52. Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

George Stillman Hillard

#53. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

Joseph Campbell

#54. Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire

#55. The arts are not for the privileged few, but for the many. Their place is not on the periphery of daily life, but at its center. They should function not merely as another form of entertainment but, rather, should contribute significantly to our well being and happiness.

John D. Rockefeller III

#56. Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

Adolf Loos

#57. The first function of an art student is to observe, to study nature.

Kimon Nicolaides

#58. One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

Susan Neiman

#59. The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Lewis Mumford

#60. The arts have always served relationships between people of different cultures so well. In a way, the arts function as a very serious kind of ambassador.

Herbie Hancock

#61. I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update.

Art Spiegelman

#62. All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#63. Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident.

Rudolf Arnheim

#64. Manipulating emotions is the most important function of meaningful art.

Ryan Quinn

#65. The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#66. The main function of the museum has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts

Albert C. Barnes

#67. The most important function of art and science is to
Awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.

Albert Einstein