Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small.

In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

I want to know art.

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

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

What is art but a way of seeing?