Seth Numrich Quotes

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

In art one idea is as good as another.

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 cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

There is no color line in art.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

The less subsidy we have, the more the 'producers' take over, and the 'bottom line' becomes the raison d'etre. That's quite an unappealing landscape for artists.

Didacticism is the death of art.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

There's no art where there's no fee.

I don't think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn't be nervous about that.

Art should never try to be popular.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Art is arbitrary but it sort of reveals itself to be right or wrong anyway.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.