Art Quotes

“The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.”

“I want to be the most melodic artist. 'His music ability, the way he write, his creativity is undeniable.' I want people to say that about me.”

“And it's sad because it's like a surprise to people - almost an anomaly - when artists are actually refined and trained on an instrument. That's the last thing people think about.”

“I have always had tremendous respect for my sister as an artist, as a woman, and now as a mother.”

“Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.”

“I think singing is such an important and incredible art form and it is quite undervalued at times.”

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

“Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

“My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine my subject to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of the multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us toward consciousness evolution.”

“I stick to my guns - that's what keeps me going as an artist. Stevie Wonder never changed from what he wanted to do, and each new album that came along was dope.”

“I feel like it took artists like Pimp C and Andre 3000 with 'International Players Anthem' - I feel like it took the Memphis sound to a certain peak but it never really broke into the mainstream.”

“Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me.”

“It's been frustrating that people only saw me as a 'featured artist' for a while, but in terms of making an album, it's been quite a nice, unpressurised environment to write songs and pick the best ones.”

“Offence is no longer defence - it's a full-time profession. Everyone is so offended all the time. The new police force that we weren't told about: the moral police. No qualifications, no training, no understanding of actual morality, but they have a degree in the art of being offended.”

“Poetry is - it's an art form, but, to me, it's also a weapon, it's also an instrument. It's the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that's a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.”

“Introducing a great artist, Alexander Wainwright in THe Fate of Pryde.In his landscapes, Alex expresses the totality of everything in the universe. At the same time, within each leaf, each drop of water or human hair, he conveys a light or glow, which seems to come—how shall I put this—from another dimension. And each brushstroke contains every ounce of his own life and vitality.From The Fate of Pryde, the second in The Trilogy of Remembrance. Enter the giveaway to win one of ten personalized, autographed copies of this novel starting July 31st to August 31st. You can sample the first fifty pages of it at my page.”

“Brockhurst, the champion of individualism, was soon launched on his favorite topic."The great fault of the American nation, which is the fault of republics, is the reduction of everything to the average. Our universities are simply the expression of the forces that are operating outside. We are business colleges purely and simply, because we as a nation have only one ideal—the business ideal.""That's a big statement," said Regan."It's true. Twenty years ago we had the ideal of the lawyer, of the doctor, of the statesman, of the gentleman, of the man of letters, of the soldier. Now the lawyer is simply a supernumerary enlisting under any banner for pay; the doctor is overshadowed by the specialist with his business development of the possibilities of the rich; we have politicians, and politics are deemed impossible for a gentleman; the gentleman cultured, simple, hospitable, and kind, is of the dying generation; the soldier is simply on parade.""Wow!" said Ricketts, jingling his chips. "They're off.""Everything has conformed to business, everything has been made to pay. Art is now a respectable career—to whom? To the business man. Why? Because a profession that is paid $3,000 to $5,000 a portrait is no longer an art, but a blamed good business. The man who cooks up his novel according to the weakness of his public sells a hundred thousand copies. Dime novel? No; published by our most conservative publishers—one of our leading citizens. He has found out that scribbling is a new field of business. He has convinced the business man. He has made it pay.”

“There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.”

“People sometimes ask if I want to be a solo artist, but it just wouldn't be any fun being on your own.”

“It's nice to see people invest in what you do as an artist and sing the songs back at you and feel something. You get to feel something more than what you were feeling when you made the record.”