The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. — Henry Geldzahler
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Art is the signature of civilizations. — Beverly Sills
Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another. — Jim Dine
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. — Octavio Paz
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. — Kary Mullis
I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist. — LeRoy Neiman
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years. — David Rockefeller
Great art picks up where nature ends. — Marc Chagall
Whether in commerce, science, or politics, history remembers the artists. — Naval Ravikant
Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists. — Willem de Kooning
The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events. — Arthur Erickson
Short Art History Quotes
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. — Charlie Chaplin
Art revolves around creating something that isn't there. — Kathleen Hanna
Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. — Egon Schiele
All art is an imitation of nature. — Seneca The Elder
Creating something that is universally beautiful. That is art. — Shu Uemura
Top 10 Art History Quotes
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. — Jeffrey Deitch
Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves -- or desires. — Jacquetta Hawkes
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. — Dave Barry
Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde
The study of History is the beginning of wisdom. — Jean Bodin
That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead. — Samuel Beckett
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
Art History Inspiring Quotes
Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out. — Philip Guston
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. — A. A. Milne
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity. — Henry James
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why we call it present.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means. — William Faulkner
Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind. — Warren MacKenzie
I am inspired by music, travel, great architecture, and good, healthy food. I look for opportunities to learn about history, art, and cooking. When I learn, I grow. — Tim Matheson
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture. — John Howe
...throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art...today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself. — Van Deren Coke
Art And History Quotes
I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me. — Herb Ritts
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts. — John Ruskin
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities. — Ad Reinhardt
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation. — Michelle Obama
Ideally, brewers interpret history, and through science they create art. — Don Spencer
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — John Updike
Yesterday is a history; Tomorrow a mystery; Today is a gift; That's why we call it the present
In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or . . . art or self-expression. — Alice Dunbar Nelson
The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic. — Lorenzo Ghiberti
The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars. — Andre Gide
Two things only the people actually desire: bread and circuses. — Juvenal
Art Details Quotes
Thoroughness characterizes all successful men. Genius is the art of taking infinite pains. All great achievement has been characterized by extreme care, infinite painstaking, even to the minutest detail. — Elbert Hubbard
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
Art is choosing to do something skillfully, caring about the details, bringing all of yourself to make the finest work you can. It is beyond ego, vanity, self-glorification, and need for approval. — Rick Rubin
Good habits create good art. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. Treat each choice you make, each action you take, each word you speak with skillful care. The goal is to live your life in the service of art. — Rick Rubin
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute. — Honore de Balzac
One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature. — Henry Fox Talbot
Quote from CARE OF THE SOUL...Thomas Moore ...to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfullness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparant insignificance. — Thomas Moore
My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down so that I can hear myself think. That quieter voice has sometimes the more interesting idea, if I can get to it. — Mark Bradford
We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption. — Marvin Minsky
Value Of History Quotes
By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue. — Chester W. Nimitz
You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for. — David Attenborough
In 1971, the U.S. 'closed the gold window,' starting an era of global fiat money reference-pricing that has been unprecedented in history. Never before had the world operated on the basis of no country anywhere having a currency tied to something with intrinsic value like gold. — Max Keiser
Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history. — Nikolai Berdyaev
I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity. — Janet Yellen
The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space. — Claude Levi-Strauss
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it. — John Buchan
To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it. — James A. Baldwin
There is so much each one of us can do to make a difference. We are at a dangerous juncture in the history of mankind. ... We need to defend our principles and values, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of international law. If we don't our world will further descend into a state of chaos. — Bianca Jagger
However, we all share the firm belief in the triumph of humanist and progressive values that mankind has achieved during its long history of struggle and creativeness. — Tran Duc Luong
What Is History Quotes
you must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right. — Rosa Parks
What happened yesterday is history. What happens tomorrow is a mystery. What we do today makes a difference - the precious present moment. — Nick Saban
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning. — Carter G. Woodson
To step into tomorrow's possibilities you must let go of yesterday's realities. Be careful of your choices between what was, is and will be. It is very hard to fully step into your destiny while you are still holding on to your history. — Christine Caine
A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language. — Noam Chomsky
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Take a stand for what's right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you'll be part of something larger and bigger and greater than yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool. — Samuel L. Jackson
Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds. — Thomas Keating
What is Money? will be regarded as the defining question of our time in history. — Robert Breedlove
Art Museum Quotes
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa. — Dave Barry
Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes. — Vladimir Mayakovsky
Art should be created for life, not for the museum — Jean Nouvel
My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes. — Steve Prefontaine
I grew up a Red Sox fan. I grew up going to Fenway Park and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum and Symphony Hall and going to the Common, walking around. My whole family at different times lived and worked in Boston. — James Spader
Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish. — Arne Glimcher
If I had to choose a single destination where I'd be held captive for the rest of my time in New York, I’d choose the Metropolitan Museum of Art. — Tim Gunn
I love to draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I'm just amazed. You don't think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it. — Michael Jackson
Some people`s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that`s fine. But that`s not why I do them. I`m a gun for hire. — Helmut Newton
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive. — Arnold Palmer
Studying Art Quotes
A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study. — Miyamoto Musashi
The purpose of the study of judo is to perfect yourself and to contribute to society. — Kano Jigoro
People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet — Miyamoto Musashi
No one expects to attain to the height of learning, or arts, or power, or wealth, or military glory, without vigorous resolution, strenuous diligence, and steady perseverance. Yet we expect to be Christians without labour, study, or inquiry. — William Wilberforce
I studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts for four years and emerged with a degree. — Bela Lugosi
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in. — Leonardo da Vinci
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward. — Vincent Van Gogh
Salesmanship, too, is an art; the perfection of its technique requires study and practice. — James Cash Penney
I did study the art of being a barber because I wanted to figure out what my routine would be. Do you start in the front or back? Top or bottom? Swivel the chair or walk around? What I did discover is there's no such thing as the perfect haircut! — Sean Patrick Thomas
Visual Art Quotes
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary. — Barbara Kruger
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan
Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life. — Steven Spielberg
In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. — Walt Disney
I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson
The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan
Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as far a reach as you can, then go all the way! — Kay WalkingStick
Art Education Quotes
There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist. — Kara Walker
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. — Francisco Goya
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well. — Aristotle
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. — George Bernard Shaw
I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world — Steve Case
It's crazy that with an iPhone, a little Starlink antenna, and a solar power unit, you could live in an isolated cave in the mountains or on a raft in the middle of the Pacific and get a world-class education, start a business or art career, and make friends all around the world. — Tim Urban
Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers. — Josef Albers
Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains. — M. C. Escher
Divinity of art, it's such a mystery. How to convince people that no matter how much money you can spend on education and art education especially, that it implants, it directs a young person for the rest of their lives, and always in the most humane and positive and dignified manner. — Mikhail Baryshnikov
Art Critic Quotes
True karate is this: that in daily life one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility, and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice. — Gichin Funakoshi
Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen. — George Jean Nathan
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art. — Toni Morrison
I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is. — Jean-Michel Basquiat
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. — Pablo Picasso
For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime. — Bruce Lee
Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye. — Clement Greenberg
Art cannot be criticized because every mistake is a new creation — Mr. Brainwash
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. — Simone Weil
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. — Uta Hagen
The great artists throughout history are the ones able to maintain this childlike enthusiasm and exuberance naturally. Just as an infant is selfish, they’re protective of their art in a way that’s not always cooperative. Their needs as a creator come first. Often at the expense of their personal lives and relationships. — Rick Rubin
I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful — Kara Walker
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please. — Hugh Magnus MacLeod of MacLeod
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc. — Friedrich Engels
The arts and humanities define who we are as a people. That is their power -- to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common. To help us understand our history and imagine our future. To give us hope in the moments of struggle and to bring us together when nothing else will. — Michelle Obama
Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity. — Jean Piaget
The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little. — Banksy
If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries. — George Crumb
It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. — James Joyce
Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness. — Max Ernst
The art of creation is older than the art of killing. — Ed Koch
History is Philosophy teaching by example. — Thucydides
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character. — David O. Mckay
When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture. — Chris Marker
I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. — Joel Meyerowitz
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity. — Guy de Maupassant
In Conclusion
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