Art Impact Quotes

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

Art, a book, a painting, a song, can definitely inspire change, whether it's a small change or a big change but you know there's novels I've read or a scene in a film that I've seen where I definitely inspired something and made a change or addressed an issue in my life or done something cliche like make a phone call.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

I am all for art's finding a large audience. But the way that's happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It's watering things down.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Can art change the world? Maybe... we should change the question: Can art change people's lives?

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

Minimal art went nowhere.

There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.

I never really expected "Hurricane" to be censored and banned around the world, but I think the good thing that came from it was that it created a dialogue, a conversation, a debate and a discussion. And that's a great thing. It brought all of us together in a unique way. And it made us look a little deeper in ourselves. I think it's a good thing.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.

Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

I believe in the theater; I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.

All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.