Arts and artists, quotes, thoughts, ideas, opinions and news, with links to various posts on art and its real meaning and rss newswire feed and blog resources.
Art, a disciplined activity that may be limited to skill or expanded to include a distinctive way of looking at the world. The word art is derived from the Latin ars, meaning “skill.” Art is skill at performing a set of specialized actions, as, for example, the art of gardening or of playing chess. Art in its broader meaning, however, involves both skill and creative imagination in a musical, literary, visual, or performance context. Art provides the person or people who produce it and the community that observes it with an experience that might be aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, or a combination of these qualities.
The status of artists in the West has changed over the centuries. In classical and medieval times, poets and other writers who used mental skills were usually ranked above actors, dancers, musicians, painters, and sculptors who used physical skills. From the Renaissance on, as all aspects of the human personality came to be valued, those skilled in the visual and performing arts gradually gained greater recognition and social prestige. Today art in all its categories is considered an essential part of human achievement, and some of its many, varied creators are ranked among the most celebrated citizens of the world.
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
Leo Tolstoy
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
Oscar Wilde
Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, that is all you need to know to be a perfect stupid.
Carl William Brown
Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul – and you answer.
Terri Guillemets
Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.
Bruce Lee
I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
Robert Henri
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
Art is the voice of our death fear. Without the shadow of death, nothing could be called art.
Andros
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.
Albert Einstein
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Jean-Luc Godard
When it is working, you completely go into another place, you’re tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That’s what it’s all about.
Keith Haring
The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri
All art is quite useless and so it is the universe.
Carl William Brown
The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
Lester Bangs
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.
Steven Pressfield
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
