Sydney J. Harris Quotes

Isn't art about breaking rules, about challenging existing systems, isn't it about discovering meaning in things or situations before others see anything in them??

There is nothing new in art except talent.

It's clever, but is it Art?

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

I can strip down basic principles of certain things and apply it to everything else. And that keeps you interested, changing the art form, making it more avant-garde. Because I can't play any instruments.

I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despite the conventional in anything, even the arts. I paint canvasses on the floor and drove one art teacher out of his mind. But that's just the way I paint best.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

Not acknowledging that beauty is complex-that's the problem. I enjoy making it complex for people, because that's my world.

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

Art always demands of us something new.

The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

All art is based on non-conformity.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Can art be completely invented? It's a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

You cannot play for safety and make art.