Shawn Crahan Quotes

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

I think that one of the things that drives me in telling stories, and art in general, is finding the beautiful in a big mass of ugly.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Fashion: a beautiful thing that becomes ugly. Art: an ugly thing that becomes beautiful.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.

I like things that look like mistakes.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.

What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process?