Top 100 Quotes About The Work Of Art
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
Oscar Wilde
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.
Auguste Rodin
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.
John Hersey
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Emotions of every color create the rich work of art that is life.
Amy Leigh Mercree
#23. We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James
#24. An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.
Matthew Barney
#25. I did hate those people ... those false artists whose work consists of the poses they strike: saying outrageous things, cultivating complicated tastes and appetites, being artificial, irritating, unbearable. People who, in fact, take from art only what is false and external ...
Mario De Sa-Carneiro
#26. Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art ...
Robert Henri
#27. Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.
Thomas Huynh
#28. The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself.
Marty Rubin
#29. I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.
Ayad Akhtar
#30. The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.
Asger Jorn
#31. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)
Martha Zamora
#32. For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
#33. The 'Fortune' I came to work for on Jan. 25, 1954, was a monthly, with pages significantly larger than what you're reading; 'art' covers that did not relate to stories inside; and a newsstand price of $1.25.
Carol Loomis
#34. No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't ... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.
LeRoy Neiman
#35. In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power - the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#36. 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
#37. Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative ... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.
Kiki Smith
#38. No fantasy, however rich, no technique, however masterly, no penetration into the psychology of the opponent, however deep, can make a chess game a work of art, if these qualities do not lead to the main goal - the search for truth.
Vasily Smyslov
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. At twenty-seven years old, I was diagnosed HIV. Three years later I decide to dedicate the remainder of my life to art. Leaving work and refusing the assistance of Unemployment Insurance or Welfare, I challenged myself to live completely through my art.
Joe Average
#42. Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
Robert Hughes
#43. Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
Chad Harbach
#44. Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.
Aristotle.
#45. 2 In chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
William Shakespeare
#46. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.
Billy Childish
#47. Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#48. Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.
Jonathan Sacks
#49. It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.
Charlie Kaufman
#50. Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.
Julian Baggini
#51. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#52. The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.
Stefan Zweig
#53. We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.
Maurice Ravel
#54. Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum
#55. I love to bring humour into my work. Because comedy is not a huge part of the art world. And big-business film takes itself very seriously.
James Franco
#56. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.
Sam Lipsyte
#57. A legislator must know how to take advantage of even the defects of those he wants to govern. The art consists in making others work rather than in wearing oneself out.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#58. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
Annie Dillard
#59. Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
Karen Armstrong
#60. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
Elliot W. Eisner
#61. In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
E. M. Forster
#62. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
Sol LeWitt
#63. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
C.S. Lewis
#64. A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
#65. 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
#66. I personally want to work with great directors and great actors. My thing is about being inspired. You want money to come, but money doesn't always come with great art. At the end of the day, it's about being satisfied with yourself as a human being. It's important to me to try to make that happen.
Scott Cohen
#67. Mystery is the essential element of every work of art.
Luis Bunuel
#68. With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful.
Marcel Proust
#69. He figured that all the threads of his experience would eventually be sewn together, taking shape in harmony and form to create a glorious work of art.
Adriana Trigiani
#70. It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.
Tennessee Williams
#71. I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.
Stan Lee
#72. I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
Jeffrey Brown
#73. Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art - an individual masterpiece.
Denis Waitley
#74. I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
Edward Albee
#75. The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
Albert Camus
#76. Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.
Albert Camus
#77. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observations. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.
Vincent Van Gogh
#78. I always look at the work of fashion designers as if they were art.
Zubin Mehta
#79. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#81. There may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn to practice the art of communication.
Max De Pree
#82. Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.
Henri Matisse
#83. I want to create the largest-ever participatory art project and highlight the concept of Shadow Philanthropy, where people help others create work without taking credit for it - through this we can really change the world.
JR
#84. Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.
Donald Judd
#86. The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.
Yoko Ono
#87. We believe that the elements in the chemical formula of our creative work, problem, invention, and art, correspond to the challenges of our age.
El Lissitzky
#88. This is a sublime work whether any higher power exists or not. It does not prove the existence of anything. No gods ever created art.'
'In an earlier age, some might have considered such a sentiment blasphemy.'
'Blasphemy,' said Revelation with a wry smile, 'is a victimless crime.
Graham McNeill
#89. If you're a writer, you've chosen art as a way of life. You must accept that some will like your work and others will not. It's the life you chose, so live with it and don't complain.
Mark Rubinstein
#90. It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.
Frank Miller
#91. Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.
Seth Godin
#92. For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.
M.C. Escher
#93. Gatekeepers and people that work in marketing are suckling pigs at the helm of Satan's phallus. They are the death of art, and ultimately the death of the human spirit.
Cockballs
#94. Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.
Garrison Keillor
#95. The complete and definitive work of art is created beyond one's individuality ... The universal transcends such a level. Mere spontaneity has never created a work of art which possesses a lasting cultural value. The method leading to universal form is based upon calculations of measure and number.
Theo Van Doesburg
#97. The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spirtual work of art. I am moved by its great genorosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.
Carole Maso
#98. I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway.
Ravi Shankar
#99. We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#100. The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
Albert Camus
