Leonard Peikoff Quotes

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.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

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.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

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

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

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'.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it.

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.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.