Art Essence Quotes

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

I like real art. It's difficult to define 'real' but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

Technique does not constitute art. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as ‘beauty,’ remote from the realities of everyday life. It is the depth and intensity of an artist’s experience that are the first importance in art.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

art, n. This word has no definition.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

There are two indices of genuine art: it is inimitable and it is ineffable.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

Art is the conveyance of spirit by means of matter.

Music is the only art that actually lives.

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

Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.