Artistic Contradiction Quotes

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

The phrase 'teen hottie' literally makes me want to throw up. I'm a pop princess at heart. Pop is about distilling what you want to say and making it easy. And the way I write isn't about making things easy. It's a weird juxtaposition.

Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.

There are times when I wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death of a national discussion as a family comedy.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

I'm an actor who hates dialogue and the present day and reality.

If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

I will say it is funny that writing a song about not wanting to entertain people is what got me a career in entertainment.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.

But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.