Art Quotes

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

People in misery is what most important in art.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

I paint with shapes.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

I am an artist, art has no color and no sex.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

When taxidermy is done well it's an amazing piece of art.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art.

You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.

Salesmanship, too, is an art; the perfection of its technique requires study and practice.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.

At the end of the day, you want to be always the one that's one step ahead of everybody, and when it comes to hip-hop, culture and art, you want to be that signature guy.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising?

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I discovered the 7th art at home when I was kid, through Charlie Chaplin's movies and those of my father who shot documentaries. He was my biggest influence. So I took his camera and started shooting.