Top 75 Serious Art Quotes
#2. Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.
John Adams
#3. Perhaps ... I mean there are people who defend that it as an art. I don't. I like it but it's not an art form as far as I'm concerned, and yet it's a similar thing, once you can't land those jumps, you're disqualified - that precludes it from ever becoming a serious art form.
Mark Morris
#4. I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.
David Foster Wallace
#5. All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
George Steiner
#6. In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.
Julia Child
#7. I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.
Twyla Tharp
#8. Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
Iris Murdoch
#10. All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.
Edward Albee
#11. There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.
Andrei Codrescu
#12. Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.
Franz Marc
#13. The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and
Tom Stoppard
#14. In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
W. H. Auden
#15. Art should be serious, not a joke. I don't like to laugh about art.
Gerhard Richter
#16. Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
Eduardo Galeano
#17. The oceans of art are awash with people who can't paint. When those who can't paint notice those who can, they are sometimes not inclined to accept them as serious like themselves. It's an unfortunate quirk of human nature and ought not to be fretted over.
Robert Genn
#18. Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.
Rachel Kushner
#19. An artist who goes around proclaiming that the art he's making is art is probably making a serious mistake. And that's one mistake I try not to make.
Peter Beard
#20. Friday's "Working Lunch" is at The Avenue on St James's Street. It's a bit like eating in an art installation, a White-Out affair that tries for a So-Serious NYC feel, but is occupied by Daddy's Girls wearing pashmina's and too many Pin Stripes worn by too many people called Hugo.
Simon Pont
#21. The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#22. Genuine art . . . does not have as its object a mere transitory game. Its serious purpose is not merely to translate the human being into a momentary dream of freedom, but actually to MAKE him free.
Friedrich Schiller
#23. Fighting isn't all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and
are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A
serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining
his spirit than with developing martial skills.
Eiji Yoshikawa
#24. Art must always remain earnest ... Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one.
Arshile Gorky
#25. 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
#26. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
#27. Seriousness is the very thing wherein consisteth our sincerity. If thou art not serious, thou art not a Christian (279).
Richard Baxter
#31. Sun Tzu said: The art of war recognises nine varieties of ground: (1) Dispersive ground; (2) facile ground; (3) contentious ground; (4) open ground; (5) ground of intersecting highways; (6) serious ground; (7) difficult ground; (8) hemmed-in ground; (9) desperate ground.
Sun Tzu
#32. It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.
John Walford
#34. Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
Ralph Ellison
#35. Serious collectors and art experts, among the world's most educated, often cannot fathom the possibility of being rooked, and then once taken, cannot face the humiliation of admitting it.
Peter Landesman
#36. She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously - she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won't give herself away - she's always on the defensive. That's what I can't stand about her type.
D.H. Lawrence
#37. I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art.
Jeffrey Deitch
#38. For me, art is make-believe. It's enchantment. It's a fable. I'm enjoying that and playing with it. Of course it's serious, and art is serious, but I'm not going to rarefy it.
Shea Hembrey
#41. By and large, the making of serious, thoughtful and occasionally valuable art has become a lonely persuasion, while the marketing of art has become a boutique operation, manipulated by fashion, self-serving art scholars and the vagaries of the auction block.
Abe Ajay
#42. Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
Chinua Achebe
#43. To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business - not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into ... rhetoric and plot.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#44. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Walter Pater
#45. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.
Chinua Achebe
#46. Chess is too difficult to be a game and not serious enough to be a science or an art.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#47. When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.
Twyla Tharp
#48. Mitt Romney announced he will fight former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield in a charity boxing match. You can tell that Romney is serious about it. Today, his butler gave him a piggyback ride up the steps of the Philadelphia art museum.
Jimmy Fallon
#49. Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious.
Giorgio Moroder
#50. 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
#51. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
#52. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#53. I'm in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don't want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead - with men and women. It's better. Instead of having sex, we have art.
Sheila Heti
#54. In the face of legalized pornography, the conscience of America seems to be paralyzed. More serious than our fakery in art, literature, and pictures is the collapse of our moral standards and the blunting of our capacity as a nation for righteous indignation.
Billy Graham
#55. The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.
Nadia Boulanger
#56. Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#57. My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.
Yahoo Serious
#58. Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.
Robin Boyd
#59. Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.
Richard Avedon
#60. I try to really take my art serious, and pay attention to detail.
Chali 2na
#61. There are only fools who believe that art is a serious matter.
Julien Torma
#62. All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it.
Mike Nichols
#63. The disco sound, you must see, is not art or anything so serious.
Giorgio Moroder
#64. The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
#65. There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
Charles Dickens
#66. The arts have always served relationships between people of different cultures so well. In a way, the arts function as a very serious kind of ambassador.
Herbie Hancock
#67. I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
Karen DeCrow
#68. The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
Lester Bangs
#69. Had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
#70. It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
#71. A writer who makes serious money is never taken seriously. Writers and artists are expected to suffer poverty and privation for their art; it's a sign of authenticity.
Jessica Zafra
#73. A game played with serious problems. That's what art is.
Kurt Schwitters
#74. Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.
John Yarmuth
#75. Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
Jonathan Galassi
