Aesthetic Significance Quotes

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

Color is only beautiful when it means something.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

Hence it is that the shape of something is especially meaningful.