Art Significance Quotes

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.

Without music, life would be a blank to me.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

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.

Art makes better humans, art is necessary in understanding the world and art makes people happy. Undeniably, art is not optional.

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

It's not the medium, but the quality of perception and expression, that determines the significance of art.

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.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

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?

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

I used to think that music was like lace upon a garment, nice to have but not necessary. I have come to believe that music is absolutely essential to our community life.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

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

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Nobody really needs a painting. It's something you kind of create value for in a way that you don't with a company. It's an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.

I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.