ethics in art Quotes

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

I believe that while art is always beyond morality, it is never above it.

It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

I believe that if your primary motivation in life is to be moral, you don't become an artist.

It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.