Oscar Wilde Quotes

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

I will say that a lot of art, some of the best art, has very powerful and meaningful messages behind it, and the more you read the stuff on the walls, the more you learn the artist's intention, and you have a totally new point of view of what it's about.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

I believe that when you go into a gallery or a museum, the most powerful pieces are the ones that don't have the words in the corner that distract you from the larger piece.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.