Cecil Beaton Quotes

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.

If the show is great, it doesn’t matter who wrote it. It doesn’t matter who takes charge when you’re filming it. It just matters if it works or not.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

Originality is another criterion of aesthetic value. We may formulate an originality principle, according to which highly valuable works of art provide hitherto unavailable insights.... Notice that, although originality is a necessary condition of high aesthetic value, it is far from a sufficient condition. Many original works have little or no aesthetic value. An artwork may present a novel but uninteresting perspective, or one that is original but wrong.

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Never give up on an idea simply because it is bad and doesn't work.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

Most people don't know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, It's very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to... As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad - to be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

For every wacky postcard, there's a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there's one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won't like. I'm just worried that it looks like I've compared my work with Rembrandt. "Gervais says he's better than Rembrandt!".

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

The show, like everything we have done and still do, is just one more experiment.

A poor original is better than a good imitation.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.