Top 100 Quotes About What Art Is
#1. I remember saying to myself, those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that's what art is. Art is about being provocative; art is also about beauty and if you leave the latter out, the former doesn't matter.
Nikky Finney
#2. That's what art is: escaping everyday normality, which wants to eat you alive.
Stefano Benni
#3. Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave. Art is a plea to love me when I'm gone. And yet, I thought to myself, who could love what I do? Who could possibly love me for this?
Supervert
#4. For me, visuals are as important as the music. I just love escapism and giving people something to escape to. To me, that's what art is.
Iggy Azalea
#5. I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.
Brian Sewell
#6. What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.
Bruce Nauman
#7. I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#8. There are some disabling myths about what art is, how to do it, what is good art, and what art is for, that have gagged generations, depriving them of significant and natural means of expression. This is a terrible loss and an unnecessary one.
Peter London
#9. This lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.
Tom Robbins
#10. The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
John Fowles
#11. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.
Kurt Cobain
#12. This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.
Katherine Paterson
#13. I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
Maria Semple
#14. That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.
Maurice Sendak
#15. I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.
David Sanborn
#16. I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.
Dan Fogelberg
#17. In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?
Robert Henri
#18. I don't make art with grandiose delusions. I do know there are limits to what art is capable of. That makes it all the more appealing to me. And I can do as I will whenever I choose.
Raymond Pettibon
#19. If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies - I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, 'I'm not going to paint this woman's neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?' Please! That's not what art is about.
Will.i.am
#20. Things that bring out your emotions are what should be in theaters and in books. That's what art is. It makes you feel things.
Dominique Swain
#21. A game played with serious problems. That's what art is.
Kurt Schwitters
#22. 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
#23. Fashion week is very inspiring, and you can't look at things one dimensionally. And I think that everyone who works in this industry has a very three-dimensional view of what fashion is and what art is.
Mark Indelicato
#25. I wonder what art is about and I'm not sure that what I do is art because I'm a photographer, not an artist. But whatever you do, the secret is to do what you think you ought to do, and do the hell out of it.
Todd Walker
#26. To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.
John Lautner
#27. 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
#28. We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.
Rebecca Makkai
#29. If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.
Ben Wheatley
#30. I'm still totally going out and sleeping on people's floors so I can play a house show and give away music. Of course I would. That's how I started. All that sort of stuff reminds you to stay true to the essence of what art is about.
Geoff Rickly
#31. I have a pretty expanded view of what art is. I include pop music and even some sports.
Elizabeth Price
#32. I think what art is always doing is making us see the world so differently, and I don't mean just colors and light, but re-thinking relationships, spatial relationships, psychological relationships ... those who gravitate to the art world actually want to be puzzled.
Roselee Goldberg
#33. I always question if somebody else is going to love my films. I think that's what art is about - it's so individual.
Lee Daniels
#34. To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.
Noah Taylor
#35. One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.
Jeffrey Deitch
#36. Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience ... many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.
Robert Adams
#37. That's what art is, shocking people. Sometimes shocking yourself.
Willow Smith
#38. I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.
Misha Glouberman
#39. I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
Wayne Thiebaud
#40. In which, if any, of these constitutions do we find the art of ruling being practiced in the actual government of men? What art is more difficult to learn? But what art is more important to us?
Plato
#41. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.
Oscar Wilde
#42. I'm simply saying that our deepest thoughts, desires and preoccupations manifest themselves in art, whether we intend them to or not. That's what art is for; it's not cerebral, it's emotional.
Simon Pegg
#43. Science is for crowds what art is for individuals
Bogdan Vaida
#44. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
Ansel Adams
#45. Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music ... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.
Ha-Joon Chang
#46. What art is not processed? "Conceptual art." Somebody making a painting has to conceive of the size. I don't understand where these words came from. I can't accept the fact that the concept of art as our concept of humanity is expanding.
Lawrence Weiner
#47. I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.
Ice Cube
#48. Darkness is a lot of what art is and certainly in our community a lot of it is people sort of wrestling with their demons.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#49. I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.
Carl Andre
#50. The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that art can go beyond the finest specimens of art that are now in the world is not knowing what art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the spirit.
William Blake
#51. Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.
Jeff Koons
#52. Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.
Jerry Yang
#53. ...Tango is not just a dance. It's our human condition. To everyone who loves tango, it's what art is to the artist. A way to connect past and future. But you already know this my dear...
Kapka Kassabova
#54. Because that's what art is; that's what it does. It breaks your heart. It moves you. If it doesn't do that, forget it. It's not worth it.
Kate Klise
#55. What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
Marcel Duchamp
#56. People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.
Lucien Smith
#57. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
Donald Barthelme
#58. There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.
Mario Batali
#59. Religions are strange. They seem to be caught in some dream which they won't give up and trying to convince others of the truth of their dream, when in fact each person is having their own dream. Take what you need from the religions and just leave the rest, and be all right with that.
Art Hochberg
#60. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
Radka Donnell
#61. As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what's been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge.
Sloane Crosley
#62. All of my art is suitcase-sized. I always paint in mediums that dry pretty quickly because I've got to throw them in my suitcase and go. And I have so much because of that, because it's what I've always done to pass the time, and I like it.
Alison Mosshart
#63. What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
Rabindranath Tagore
#64. Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.
Russell L. Ackoff
#65. O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?
Leonardo Da Vinci
#66. I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.
Joan Rivers
#67. Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
T. S. Eliot
#68. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.
David Altmejd
#69. What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must ... communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature.
Medardo Rosso
#70. Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.
Paula Rego
#71. I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
M.I.A.
#72. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.
Kim Young-ha
#73. Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift
#74. Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
Rudyard Kipling
#76. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#77. I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.
Reggie Watts
#78. Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.
Sebastian Junger
#79. It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.
David Gilmour
#80. I had no special training at all; I am completely self taught. I don't fit the mold of a visual arts designer or a graphic designer. I just had a strong concept about what a game designer is. Someone who designs projects to make people happy. That's a game designer's purpose.
Toru Iwatani
#81. Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.
Antony Gormley
#82. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#83. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.
Ira Sachs
#84. Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
Alexander Theroux
#85. The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.
Jeff Koons
#86. People in misery is what most important in art.
Zhang Yimou
#87. Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
#88. Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.
Kathleen Hanna
#89. One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Diane Arbus
#90. All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.
Henry Moore
#91. I've had people come up to me with the strangest interpretations of what my lyrics might mean, and I'm like, "You go! I never thought of that, but that works,"...I think that true art is a universal reflection, and true artists are just messengers of that reflection or, at best, skilled presentors.
Serj Tankian
#92. Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#93. Happiness is what matters, feeling alive-not art or knowledge or money.
Marty Rubin
#94. Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
Simon Critchley
#95. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#96. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#97. Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.
James Monaco
#98. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.
Art Spiegelman
#100. I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.
Bruce Springsteen
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