Art Quotes

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

John Updike

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

John Updike

A picture is a poem without words.

Horace

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Jerry Saltz

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief

Friedrich Nietzsche

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Constantin Brancusi

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

Jerry Saltz

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

John Ruskin

As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

Albrecht Durer

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

William Hazlitt

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Jean Anouilh

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Brian Eno

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Emily Carr

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Jerzy Kosinski

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

George Bernard Shaw

Land really is the best art.

Andy Warhol

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

George Jean Nathan

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Simone de Beauvoir

Art is born of humiliation.

W. H. Auden