Artistic Liberation Quotes

What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

It's so liberating to play a song in front of 50,000 people that you've never played before. Not something you played a long time ago and have forgotten: Never. Played. Before. There's something magical about it.

When I'm on stage by myself, I don't have to think about anything. I don't have to worry about anything because I'm not responsible for anything except just opening my mouth and making sure music comes out.

We don't need to be taught to make art, but sometimes we need permission to do so. Following instructions is overrated.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

[My art is] capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world.'

Losing yourself in the character opens you up in a way that no amount of precise preparation can.

The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

I just make what I'm making, and then one day I won't want to make it anymore. I think that's a luxury we should be able to have as people, especially as artists.

With regards to the paint, I'm normally quite introverted and shy. I keep myself to myself, and I find that when I hide behind the paint, so to speak, I'm able to let myself go more and move more freely than I can without it.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Art penetrates, no matter how many bans you put out.

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

Art will liberate itself from the needs and desires of men. No longer will we paint a forest ora horseas we like oras theyappear to us, but as they really are.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Becoming a musician was all about escape. It was about getting away from the foulness that was me.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

Why I talk so seriously about art is that art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can't get rid of. They've tried, but ultimately they can't stamp it out.