Art Quotes

Great artists of every medium have something to say when asked, “What is art?” Enjoy the words of these artists in print!

Marshall McLuhan – communications theorist, philosopher:

“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th Century.”

“Art is anything you can get away with.”

“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

“As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into our collective purposes.”

”We become what we behold. We shape our tools then our tools shape us.”

Roy Adzak – British sculptor, photographer and painter:
“Goof art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.”

Carl Andre – American minimalist sculptor and poet:
“Art is an intersection of many human needs.”

Alain Arias-Misson – Belgian-born thinker, artist, writer, and sculptor:
“The purpose of art is not a rarified intellectual distillate – it is life, intensified, brilliant life.”

Aristotle – Greek philosopher:
“Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature’s unrealized ends.”

Nick Bantock – British artist and author:
“Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer … but never judge it.”

Annie Bevan – American painter of nature:
“Art is our memory of love. The most an artist can do through their work is say, let me show you what I have seen, what I have loved, and perhaps you will see it and love it too.”

Georges Braque – French cubist painter and sculptor:
“Art is meant to disturb.”

Bertolt Brecht – German playwright:
“ Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Albert Camus – French existentialist thinker and novelist:
“If all the world were clear, art would not exist.”

Gunter Grass – German author and playwright:
“Art is beautiful but it is hard, like a religion without a purpose.”
“Art is accusation, expression, passion.”

Paul Cezanne – French impressionist painter:
“Art is harmony parallel with nature.”

Marc Chagall – Russian-born French painter and stained glass artist:
“Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else.”

Raymond Chandler – American author if crime stories and novels:
“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”

John Cheever – American novelist and short-story writer:
“Art is the triumph over chaos.”

Edgar Degas – French realist/impressionist painter and sculptor:
“Art is really a battle.”

Eugene Delacroix – French romantic painter:
“Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artiface, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.”

James Dickey – American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic:
“I once had the nerve to ask Picasso, “What is art?” He answered, “Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.””

T.S. Eliot – American ex-patriot poet, dramatist, and literary critic:
“Art is the escape from personality.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson – American essayist, poet, and leader of the early 19th Century Transcendentalist movement:
“Art is the path of the creator to his work.”

Kermit the Frog – green, American Muppet:
“How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced; I am a visual art.”

Paul Gauguin – French post-impressionist painter:
“Art = a mad search for individualism.”
“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – German poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher:
“A genuine work of art usually displeases at first sight, as it suggests a deficiency in the spectator.”

 

 

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