Ephemeral Art Quotes

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.

Performing in the theater is a very ethereal profession because you do it once and it goes out into the ether and it goes into people's minds and that's the only place that it ever exists. And it never exists truly; it only exists in the way that people think they remember it. But it's a really powerful way to tell a story and to pass something on.

Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?

The ideal is to put on shows where, if you go into the same space again, you don't remember ever having been there before, because where you were was a space that only existed that one time, created by the music.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

Dance in the most perishable of the arts. Ballets are forgotten, ballerinas retire, choreographers die--and what remains of that glorious production which so excited us a decade ago, a year ago, or even last night?

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

For me, it's mostly about having stuff on the street. You're walking down the street, you do it every day, and suddenly there's something that wasn't there yesterday: something bright and cheerful and different. It might stay there for a year; maybe it will disappear.

My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it's memorable... If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there's really not much point in you having been there - or me, for that matter.

I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.

Theatre is alive and it is now, and then it's gone.

It's impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won't. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I'd picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn't like the attention.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Public art is ephemeral by nature. Google 's new project not only catalogs an artist's work but archives it and allows people to see the art long after it has disappeared.

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

Storage problems make neon signs the most ephemeral of commercial arts.

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read.

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.