Antoni Tapies Quotes

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

Art is supposed to spark conversation and make people think.

The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

Life is earnest, art is gay.

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.

The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn't true you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife.

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful

I don't think any of us really knows why we're here. But I think we're supposed to believe we're here for a purpose.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.' 'Love life more than the meaning of it?' 'Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That's what I've been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.

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

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

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

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood - and I never mind that. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking.

I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art.