Artistic Theory Quotes

Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.

Much of left-wing artistic activity … has been restricted, narrowed … sometimes made sterile … [This flows] from a central source … That source is the vulgarization of the theory of art which lies behind left-wing thinking: namely, “art is a weapon.” I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straightjacket.

I didn't get a Bachelor's degree - I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, which means I didn't have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.

I gave up on the idea of making art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what art is returned as a critical issue.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

Pytheos made a mistake by not observing that the arts are each composed of two things, the actual work and the theory of it. One of these, the doing of the work, is proper to men trained in the individual subject, while the other the theory is common to all scholars.

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

I love to read theories without ever using them when working... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.

Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

I am by trade a designer, and I did Fine Art for my degree.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

I went to Maryland Institute College of Art, and I studied illustration there.

Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.

Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.