Quotes about art

I heard Senator Sam Irvin of Watergate fame say something that stayed with me: 'If you can paint a really good picture of a cow, you don't have to write the word "cow" under it.'

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art. Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together. One tendency uninformed by the other can bring forth only coldness or chaos—the stiffness of a Triumph tulip, the slackness of a wild rose.

[T]he recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius. And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader’s soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair.

I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know — or are supposed to know — that results are all that count in art.

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view — the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.