Western Art Quotes

#1. Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another.

Jim Dine

#2. At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.

Germaine Greer

#3. Western art has a certain relationship to nature.

Brice Marden

#4. The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation.

Ibn Warraq

#5. When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.

Arne Glimcher

#6. In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy.

Jay L. Garfield

#7. The gilding holds the eye just long enough to let God enter the soul. The two-dimensional image does not require interpretation, and therefore doesn't stand between you and God the way it does in three-dimensional western art.

Robert C. Yeager

#8. Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.

Michel Houellebecq

#9. Economically, legally, and politically powerless throughout much of western history, women have been linked to nature and the unknowable through metaphors of the body while the masculine has signified culture and mental activity.

Whitney Chadwick

#10. I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

Tim Crane

#11. Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

John Howe

#12. I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees and rain and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area. That all says Pacific Northwest to me. Salmon. It really only exists on the Western side of the Cascades.

Kyle MacLachlan

#13. Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience.

Ibn Warraq

#14. I'm very much involved with Asian art and its theory and practice, mainly Chinese because that was quite sophisticated. I tend to look at that more than I look the Western.

Brice Marden

#15. Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western

Ang Lee

#16. I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them
I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say.

Henry James

#17. I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.

Peter Greenaway

#18. Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

Camille Paglia

#19. The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.

Leland Ryken

#20. For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.

Os Guinness

#21. Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.

Allen Ginsberg

#22. Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

Takashi Murakami

#23. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#24. I was surprised to hear you'd grown up on a ranch," he said.
"What is that?"
"You don't like cowboy art."
She chuckled. "You think they go hand in hand?

B. J. Daniels

#25. Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

Camille Paglia

#26. Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.

Camille Paglia

#27. I have not been able to give a concrete answer to the question of how the nations of Asia can create their own unique liberal arts traditions that are not simply the importation of a Western model. The question is a critical one and the answer must come from Asian universities themselves.

Henry Rosovsky

#28. Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics.

Virginia Postrel

#29. I think in the Western world we have gotten overly identified with doing, and we've kind of forgotten about the art of being. And we don't see value in it; we think that if you're not doing something all of the time, being very active and producing something, then you're sort of wasting your time.

Shakti Gawain

#30. If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

Clint Eastwood

#31. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

#32. Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

Zadie Smith

#33. The Japanese have a word for it. It's Judo - the art of conquering by yielding. The Western equivalent of Judo is, "Yes dear".

J. P. McEvoy

#34. Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.

Ricky Skaggs

#35. It is in the oral traditions of the villages that the arts of India are really alive. The brief Western immortality of museums is pointless to people who have seen eternity in their earth.

Santha Rama Rau