Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

I think great art should play a part in the ordinary man's life, don't you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.

I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

It does not follow, that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.............. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.

The true test of all the arts is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.