Artistic Significance Quotes

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Art needs to stand for something.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Art imitating life and life imitating art, and it's beyond the job - it will always be a marked period in my life.

Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured.

For art to be art it has to cure.

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

There is no such thing as #1 in art.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Humanity looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny.

I'm not saying the 1970s was a golden age - I don't believe such a thing exists in art . . . It would be like talking about a golden age of science. But it's true that those were slightly more ideological times, and the relevance of artists wasn't established by their CVs but by their work.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.