Top 100 Quotes About Understanding Art
#1. 'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.
Michael Craig-Martin
#3. The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.
Theaster Gates
#4. Above all, it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it.
Fernand Leger
#5. I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you ... " and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability.
C. JoyBell C.
#6. I was a very interested arts student, I was always into that part of school and when I got into high school I went into architectural drafting. It gave me an understanding of how to build things and it's really helped me put things in perspective. With my music and my movies, to me it's all art.
Ice Cube
#7. I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art.
Laurance Rockefeller
#8. At school, I always felt the art room was the place where you could sit and talk. It was a place of solace. I wasn't the best artist at school by a long shot; it was more the understanding and the support that came from that room.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#9. Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art.
Joshua Reynolds
#10. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
Dana Gioia
#11. I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.
Philip Kitcher
#13. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
Ben Fountain
#14. Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.
Robert Rauschenberg
#15. Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.
Anna Deavere Smith
#16. And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.
PJ Harvey
#17. By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones.
Wes Nisker
#18. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Vivian Gornick
#19. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
Andy Goldsworthy
#20. Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world,
Dana Gioia
#21. The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
Immanuel Kant
#22. The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.
Johan Huizinga
#23. Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
Immanuel Kant
#24. We must rebuild organic communities, where people can come together and have analogue conversations and share stories, art, music and emotions.
Bryant McGill
#25. There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability.
Marian Engel
#26. Humanity requires for its understanding and governance not science but art,
Mark Helprin
#27. Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving ... in the contemporary world, we have come to expect instant response and immediate understanding.
Nicholas Serota
#28. A high self-esteem having artist works hard to be understood. A low self-esteem having artist works hard to be agreed with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#29. Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.
Doug Aitken
#30. I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
Oscar Wilde
#31. [ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.
William Deresiewicz
#32. Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience ... they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing ... the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity
Mae Jemison
#33. Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?
Kathleen Raine
#34. As far as the arts and the sciences are concerned, the German mind appreciates most highly that which it does not understand of the latter, and that which it does not enjoy of the former.
Franz Grillparzer
#35. My planes of understanding moved, and I felt it all at once and separately at the same time. For a moment, art was faith, and understanding that concept was art in itself, too.
Bryan Hutchinson
#36. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
Kenneth Tynan
#37. I'm from the South, and there's a different understanding of how to chop. There's a syllable play. It's a delicate art. Your accent has a lot to do with it. If you're from a certain area, words don't roll of your tongue as slick.
Yelawolf
#38. Art is the supreme communicator of diverse cultures and ideas in a common frame of understanding, a virtual bridge across time. It is also the universal link into genius.
Edward J. Fraughton
#39. People so often loose sight of the magic in life once they understand how it works.
Thomas Rogal II
#40. Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.
James Surowiecki
#41. The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life,
Barbara Kruger
#42. Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.
Vicki Baum
#43. A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they're capable of understanding.
Steve Prefontaine
#44. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.
Austin Kleon
#45. The art of acting presupposes three phases: understanding a part, intuiting a part, and contemplating the essence of a part.
Franz Grillparzer
#46. Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.
Aleister Crowley
#47. Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life.
Steven Spielberg
#48. No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what.
Roger Fry
#49. Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.
Walter Darby Bannard
#50. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
William Hazlitt
#51. How is it that in the so-called barbarian ages art was understood, whereas in our age of progress exactly the opposite is true?
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#52. Sir Joshua Reynolds, said Jonathan, once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.
Charles Williams
#53. Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.
William Adams
#55. And that's what art is, a form in which people can reflect on who we are as human beings and come to some understanding of this journey we are on.
Wendell Pierce
#56. What is Christian in art does not lie in the theme but in the spirit of it, in its wisdom and the understanding of reality it reflects.
Hans Rookmaaker
#57. One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.
Art Spiegelman
#58. The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
Louis L'Amour
#59. [On art:] I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from, whatever subjects it represents.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
#60. Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of it.
Eleanora Duse
#61. Michael's Powell art director was a painter and they had a wonderful friendship and artistic understanding. Michael himself, in the way he designed his own house, it was always with bright colours. Very un-English!
Thelma Schoonmaker
#62. Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.
Augustus William Hare
#63. Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.
Will Shetterly
#64. For your pleasure I'm creating a collection of erotic drawings so poorly rendered that I feel certain they will completely shake your belief in my understanding of human anatomy.
Ginn Hale
#65. The idea of the culture that you live in determining meaning in your art, though, is a very important aspect of what art would be about. But that had more to do with the kind of general understanding of what the hell you're doing, you know.
Robert Barry
#66. An understanding of what food is and how cooking works does no violence to the art of cuisine, destroys no delightful mystery. Instead, the mystery expands from matters of expertise and taste to encompass the hidden patterns and wonderful coincidences of nature.
Harold McGee
#67. The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious ... that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.
Edgard Varese
#68. HIP-HOP HAS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS DEALING WITH MUSIC, RAP, GRAFFITI ART, B-BOYS (WHAT YOU CALL BREAK BOYS) ... AND ALSO DEALING WITH CULTURE, AND A WHOLE MOVEMENT DEALING WITH WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING, AS WELL AS PEACE UNITY AND FUN.
Afrika Bambaataa
#69. Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make. It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers and benefits for the stakeholders.
Philip Kotler
#70. Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
Amiri Baraka
#71. Nature alone can lead to the understanding of art, just as art brings us back to nature with greater awarness. It is the source of all beauty, since it is the source of all life.
Eugene Carriere
#72. Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.
Hermann Hesse
#73. He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#74. Art is a form of understanding like philosophy and science and mathematics are an understanding but the difference is that art has the capacity to hold all these different things. It is the form of understanding that is best suited for the contemporary time.
Robert Longo
#75. Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.
John Constable
#77. It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in ... art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure.
Ursula Goodenough
#78. I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.
Criss Jami
#79. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#80. Life scars the writer but he is not without weapons of vengeance. The art of fiction is a prism that he can use to refract human experience. That one can write about something gives him courage to endure it; that he has written about it brings him, if not deeper understanding, some kind of peace.
Kerima Polotan
#81. Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.
Alan Dean Foster
#82. The art of moving forward lies in understanding what to leave behind.
Seth
#83. It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.
Tom Colicchio
#85. The core of understanding lies in the individual mind, and until that is touched everything is uncertain and superficial. Truth cannot be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential and ourselves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
Bruce Lee
#86. Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.
Roger Ebert
#87. I owe much to mother. She had an expert's understanding, but also approached art emotionally.
David Rockefeller
#88. The appreciation of the merits of art of the emotions it conveys depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life ...
Leo Tolstoy
#89. Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding ... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.
Emily Carr
#90. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen
#91. All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.
Walter Pater
#92. What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.
Henri Matisse
#94. Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#95. Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us. As
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#96. 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
#97. The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.
Andre Maurois
#98. History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.
Andre Malraux
#99. 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
#100. Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.
Rockwell Kent
