Top 100 Quotes About The Work Of Art
#1. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.
Raoul Vaneigem
#2. The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.
Auguste Rodin
#3. The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.
Andre Gide
#4. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#5. I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed ... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.
Yves Klein
#6. The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#7. For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.
Joyce Cary
#9. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.
Adolf Loos
#10. All cultural explorers ... start off from specific roots which color their vision and define the allegiances of the work of art they produce.
Keorapetse Kgositsile
#11. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
Marcel Proust
#12. Random thoughts that fly away.
Where words has no place to stay.
Let it be right where they are.
Let the work of art preserve its life.
Diana Rose Morcilla
#13. The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.
Adolf Loos
#14. Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.
Lewis Hyde
#15. There is some music that's truly dark, in that it's dark in terms of hopeless. But then again, the act of hope is just making the work of art.
Eyvind Kang
#16. The work of art ... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.
Herbert Read
#17. Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste.
Diego Rivera
#18. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
#19. Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation
Alija Izetbegovic
#20. The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
Ralph Ellison
#21. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.
Adolf Loos
#22. Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.
Rudolf Arnheim
#23. Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
Ben Shahn
#24. There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
Andre Gide
#25. To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.
Larry Wall
#26. The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
Camille Paglia
#27. There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#28. The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.
Wassily Kandinsky
#29. The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
#30. I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
Edward Albee
#31. The work of art, though bound by its genetic markings and indelible fingerprints, is boundless in the infinite elaborations of its destiny, and therefore in the range of its interpretations.
Russell Sherman
#32. The work of art is above all a process of creation.
Paul Klee
#33. My art takes birth when my loneliness becomes my companion ... when I take lives and deaths much personally and work when others play. When I meet myself and find that the truth of life is not the dream of tender age ... but the fire within me that creates the work of art.
Jeet Aulakh
#34. Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.
Sol LeWitt
#35. The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
#36. Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.
Marianne Moore
#37. I believe that the making of art is primarily for the benefit of the artist. If what the artist has created communicates messages and feelings to others, then it is because of the universality of the human experience that is speaking through the work of art.
David Walker
#38. The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
Albert Camus
#39. Awareness of approach to death can be a beautiful thing, a frame into which we can put the work of art that is our life, our personal masterpiece.
June Singer
#40. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
#41. The work of art expresses precisely those things which do not die. It must do so, however, in a form that bears witness to the artist's own era.
Constantin Brancusi
#42. The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz
#43. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.
Adolf Loos
#44. 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
#45. The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
Ernest Becker
#46. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
#48. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
Pope Paul VI
#49. The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.
Ferdinand Hodler
#50. The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make.
Simone Weil
#51. Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.
Arnold Aronson
#52. The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
Clive James
#53. The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#54. What the work of art looks like isn't too important.
Sol LeWitt
#55. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.
Clement Greenberg
#56. Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Michel Foucault
#57. The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.
Niklas Luhmann
#58. If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured.
Brian Ferneyhough
#59. We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.
Christo
#60. The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.
Sol LeWitt
#61. The work of art
acts like another living person
with whom we are conversing.
Anton Ehrenzweig
#62. With all its variety and liveliness, color acts in the work of art as blood does as it circulates through our bodies. Color is what keeps the painting alive and moving.
Joseph Raffael
#63. Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
Walter Benjamin
#64. The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
Hans Hofmann
#65. Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.
Guy Davenport
#66. The work of art is a scream of freedom.
Christo
#67. The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it;
Julian Barnes
#68. The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest.
Donald Kuspit
#69. An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.
Arnold Schoenberg
#70. The work of art itself is ... a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
Susan Sontag
#71. The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
Bernard Berenson
#72. The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
Gustave Flaubert
#73. The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator ... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.
Octavio Paz
#75. The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
Claire Messud
#76. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art
Salvador Dali
#78. Nothing compares to pizza, and you discover and rediscover it when you are much too old, and you have got too much cholesterol and triglycerides ... A collector is someone who is ready to devour the work of art that he wants to possess at all costs.
Augusto De Luca
#79. The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you ...
Lawrence Durrell
#80. When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.
Claire Messud
#81. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#82. A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.
Anne Truitt
#83. The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.
Edward Ruscha
#84. If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.
Karl Kraus
#85. When contemplating a work of art it is possible to perceive if it has been created according to the eye or to the spirit, in other words, if it projects three-dimensional reality or spiritual n-dimensionality.
Theo Van Doesburg
#86. The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
Oscar Wilde
#87. If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money.
Robert Crumb
#88. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.
Rhianna Pratchett
#89. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#90. She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art.
Duff Brenna
#91. 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
#92. A composition - and every work of art is one - is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Jostein Gaarder
#93. The reason companies work is because you're able to get a lot of people doing the work; it's not because of this visionary. Steve Jobs didn't make Apple; it was a bunch of people. The building of the right team is an art in and of its own right.
D.A. Wallach
#94. The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.
Ellen Glasgow
#95. The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.
John Hersey
#96. Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
Paul Hawken
#97. Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#98. A true work of art is shaped by the hands of another, and if in shaping us that 'other' is anything other than God, the piece will never touch the remotest periphery of its potential.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#99. It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
#100. Emotions of every color create the rich work of art that is life.
Amy Leigh Mercree
