Top 100 Quotes About What Is Art
#1. What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
Rabindranath Tagore
#2. 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
#3. What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.
Rebecca West
#5. Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
#6. What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#7. What is art? ( ... ) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life - love and sacrifice.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#8. What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
Richard Condon
#9. What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.
Tahar Rahim
#10. I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."
Scott Avett
#12. What is art? ... From a strictly logical point of view, a question with no clear answer comes under the suspicion of being meaningless. But a strictly logical point of view never shows us much about art ...
Carter Ratcliff
#13. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?
Andre Dubus
#14. What is art in the final analysis? Art is the shining forth of one's interiority
Mu Xin
#15. What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.
Edvard Munch
#17. Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.
Anselm Kiefer
#19. What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?
Louis Sullivan
#21. If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?
Ai Weiwei
#23. I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.
James Dickey
#24. There is a skill to learning. It is all about what is and what is not. While Science is knowing what is, Art is creating what is not.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
#25. What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.
Rudolf Nureyev
#26. What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ...
John Geddes
#27. And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.
Joyce Carol Oates
#28. 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
#29. There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.
Mario Batali
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.
David Altmejd
#39. 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
#40. Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.
Paula Rego
#41. 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.
#42. 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
#43. Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.
David Gilmour
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
Alexander Theroux
#54. 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
#55. People in misery is what most important in art.
Zhang Yimou
#56. 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
#57. Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Happiness is what matters, feeling alive-not art or knowledge or money.
Marty Rubin
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. That's what art is: escaping everyday normality, which wants to eat you alive.
Stefano Benni
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.
Bruce Springsteen
#72. At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.
Edvard Munch
#73. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.
Art Buchwald
#74. But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.
Richard Serra
#75. The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult ... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them.
Judith Weir
#76. The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.
William McDonough
#77. The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.
Tom Robbins
#79. Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented - which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole.
Louise Bourgeois
#80. The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
Gloria Steinem
#81. 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
#82. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
#83. 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
#84. Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Donald Knuth
#85. Art is as original and important as it is precisely because it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say.
John Gardner
#86. What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
Jeanette Winterson
#87. Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?
Edith Schaeffer
#88. Art is not so much talent as character ... it's what you are, the qualities of the person.
John Olsen
#89. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
Edward St. Aubyn
#90. Becoming a fashion designer is agreeing with the fact that what you experience or what you see as free is also connected to a system. Does that mean giving up your freedom? I still don't know the answer. There's a very different kind of psychology going on in the fashion scene than in art.
Raf Simons
#91. It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.
Vincent Van Gogh
#92. Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.
Daniel Silva
#93. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie
#94. I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards because in the end that's what the art that I'm working with is.
George Lucas
#95. But don't call me an actor. I'm just a worker. I am an entertainer. Don't say that what I am doing is art.
Javier Bardem
#96. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
#97. The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.
Andy Goldsworthy
#98. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D.H. Lawrence
#99. My mom is an art teacher and is very much into the performing arts. What can I say? She is the female in my life and has guided me on how to act and conduct myself. A lot of my strength comes from her.
Erin Andrews
#100. What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
Dennis Quaid
