James Baldwin Quotes

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

There was no image of the other biological half of myself. And as an artists, as a - as an - as a portraitist, the look of who you are was radically important to me.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

Everything on my body has a meaning. I don't do art just because. It does look cool but it also has a meaning.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

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

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

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

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

I'm not saying the 1970s was a golden age - I don't believe such a thing exists in art . . . It would be like talking about a golden age of science. But it's true that those were slightly more ideological times, and the relevance of artists wasn't established by their CVs but by their work.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.