Victor Hugo Quotes

Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

The power and reach of music should never be underestimated.

The artist has tremendous power to change the world.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.

You can positively affect and change a social circumstance with art, and it’s vital that a change happens now.

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

Music has given a voice to many generations, and I think we, as artists, can be a part of creating a better world.

I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

Art is a self-replicating force.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

How can art make a difference in the world?

When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.

Honesty in art inspires and moves me. I am passionate about creating truthful experiences as much as I love being the spectator to a brilliant body of work.

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.