Andre Breton Quotes

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

I'm not saying the 1970s was a golden age - I don't believe such a thing exists in art . . . It would be like talking about a golden age of science. But it's true that those were slightly more ideological times, and the relevance of artists wasn't established by their CVs but by their work.

The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Art is alive because it is mortal.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.