Camille Pissarro Quotes

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Basquiat will continue to show us new things about who we are and why he was so important.

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

It's easier to make art for a society at a certain point in time with an understanding of what's going on.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

Hollywood likes to boast that it can elevate the national conscience.

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

That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.

Sometimes a time dictates what a film will be. Sometimes a film dictates what the time will be.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

Thinking about the artists I've loved through the years, my favorites are the ones who've made music with cultural, societal and political significance.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

Art may not have the power to change the course of history, but it can provide a perspective on historical events that needs to be heard, even if it's seldom heeded. After all the temporary influences that once directed the course of history have vanished, great art survives and continues to speak to each generation.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.