Susanne Langer Quotes

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

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

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Know that the secret of the arts is to correct nature.

The artist is called a creator.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.

The price we sell things for is not important. What is important is we sell art that has to be replaced. You become good in art by doing art. The more you sell, the more you must produce.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.