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Quotes you can use to start conversation or to add interest to speeches or presentations


Art

Art




Quotes about Art

Anecdotes about Art

Book Extracts about Art

Art

In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, Banksy, the subversive British graffiti artist, was asked what drew him to his work. “I used to want to save the world,” he responded dryly, “but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”

Another Banksy quote: “The poet produces poems, the painter produces paintings, the criminal produces crimes. If you can do all three at once, you can really confuse the shit out of them.”

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. (Pablo Picasso)

Every big artist, every important people — Michelangelo, Leonardo, Napoleon — is impotent, and this is good. Because if you work too well with your sex you never produce nozzing. Only childs. But for artist, le libido and le sexual instincts sublimate in the artistic creation.(Salvadore Dali) Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

How very Botticellian!

America's only contribution to [the history of] furniture is the electric chair (Elaine de Kooning)

I came to consider the art world as some kind of strange fashion following cult. Members of the art world all shared the same views, talked nonsense and froze out any one who dared to consider their own talent more important than following what every one else was doing. - Paul Friedlander

“If you want to make your living as an artist, you paint whatever people ask you for.” —Daniel Anum Jasper, who paints movie posters in Ghana

(Robert and Ethel Scull were foundation Pop Art collectors in 1960's NY. Asked by an interviewer about accusations that he and his wife bought art for investment and for social climbing, Mr. Scull replied: ''It's all true. I'd rather use art to climb than anything else.''

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan

God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso

Something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further (Keith Haring)

Art is the colors and textures of your imagination.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Art is making something out of nothing and then selling it. (Frank Zappa)

Art is not what you see but what you make others see.

The world today doesn't make any sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? (Picasso)

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Coloring outside the lines is a fine art.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K. Chesterton

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

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

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

Art does not try to reproduce what we see. Rather it tries to make us see.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer to shape it.

By definition, artists don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

'She was clean': no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses? - Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

(David Hockney) 'A man suddenly reached out and took my hand and placed it on his erect cock. I enjoyed it. And it gave me a lifelong love of cinemas'

Film is a collaborative art. Bend over.

The movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair. It's full of surprises and you're constantly getting fucked.

Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

An actor is not quite a human being, but then, who is?

Jeff Koon's work is the last it of methane left in the intestine of the dead cow that is post-modernism.

Old masters are worth more than old mistresses.

Art is what you can get away with.

If it sells it's art

Abstract art: made by the untalented, sold by the unprincipled, bought by the bewildered

Abstract art is like a woman - you'll never like it if you try to understand it

It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one

Art is the only job available for people who can't get on with others but still want to think they're special

Art critics: failed artists, like most artists



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