Works Of Art Quotes - Page 37

• The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

  Lawren Harris

  Art, Tests, Truth Is

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• Ideas' can be only in the distant background of a work of art, something like a very low horizon. In the middle distance and foreground... there shouldn't be any 'ideas' visible.

  Mu Xin

  Art, Distance, Ideas

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• I have found, through years of practice, that people garden in order to make something grow; to interact with nature; to share, to find sanctuary, to heal, to honor the earth, to leave a mark. Through gardening, we feel whole as we make our personal work of art upon our land.

  Julie Moir Messervy

  Art, Nature, Garden

  Julie Moir Messervy (2007). “The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning”, p.19, Bunker Hill Publishing, Inc.

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• The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage.... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Art, Air, Rivers

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• How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

  Oskar Kokoschka

  Girl, Art, Men

  Oskar Kokoschka, Marlborough Gallery (1981). “Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980): memorial exhibition”

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• In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.

  Hans Haacke

  Art, Order, Political

  Hans Haacke, Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, England), Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (1978). “Hans Haacke: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1978; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1979”

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• Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

  Randall Jarrell

  Art, Suffering

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrel, p. 200l, 1969.

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• Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art

  Marcel Duchamp, Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe (1999). “Marcel Duchamp, respirateur”, Hatje Cantz Pub

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• All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Great Work, Great Things

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• There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Reading, Class

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art”, p.34

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• It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

  Marianne Moore

  Art, Reading, Mean

  Marianne Moore (1997). “The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

  Jane Jacobs

  Art, Mistake, Order

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.373, Vintage

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• I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

  Federico Fellini

  Movie, Art, Believe

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• Feelings aroused by the touch of someones hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith - all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.

  Bernie Siegel

  Beautiful, Art, Laughter

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• In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

  Jose Clemente Orozco

  Art, Ideas, Creating

  José Clemente Orozco (1983). “Textos de Orozco: Estudio y Apéndice”

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• Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.

  Ian Buruma

  Art, Fiction, Berlin

  1986 Of Christopher Isherwood. In the New Republic, 4 Nov.

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• A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.

  Budd Hopkins

  Beautiful, Art, Way

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• The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

  Randall Jarrell

  Art, Real, Men

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell,"An Unread Book", p. 20, 1969.

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• In every work of art, the artist himself is present.

  Christian Morgenstern

  Art, Artist

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• Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Mean, Ideas

  "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role". The Observer, June 29, 1958.

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• The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Real

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.129, Macmillan

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• The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Knowing, Speak

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.

  George Henry Lewes

  Running, Art, Believe

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• My grandfather was a most gifted person, and amongst his many qualities, one of them had always particularly impressed me. While the past was a book he had read and re-read may times, the future was just one more literary work of art into which he used to pour himself with deep thought and concentration. Innumerable people since his death have told me how he used to read in the future, and this certainly was one of his very great strengths.

  Aga Khan IV

  Art, Book, Past

  "My Beloved Grandfather: A few words by Mowlana Hazar Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan IV". www.amaana.org. November 1977.

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• The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.

  Asger Jorn

  Art, Foundation, Depth

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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