Art Quotes

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Auguste Rodin

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

John Berger

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

Jerry Saltz

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

...it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public...should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

Leo Steinberg, Contemporary Art

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Harold Rosenberg

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch

Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Li

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Milla Jovovich

What is art but 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

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Ezra Pound

The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Ezra Pound

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Ezra Pound

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Ezra Pound

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Ezra Pound

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Logan Pearsall Smith