Walker Evans Quotes

The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

All art is quite useless.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

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.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.