Oscar Wilde Quotes

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

Art is such an important part of our culture.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.