Charles Baudelaire Quotes

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

What Artistic and Scientific Experience Have in Common - Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaninful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

Art is a sense of magic.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

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

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

Artists make our lives livable and enjoyable.

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

I don't see art as entertainment.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.