Joseph Campbell Quotes

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

Beauty reveals itself in the course of an experience with an object.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I don't see art as entertainment.

Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

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

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

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.

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture.

For art to be art it has to cure.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.