I Am A Work Of Art Quotes

“How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.”

— George Gissing

“Faith to me is a form of self-expression, like a work of art, a manifestation of freedom, not a tool for mindless conformity.”

— Sahar El-Nadi

“There are ... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.”

— E.T.A. Hoffmann

“Art matters. It is not simply a leisure activity for the privileged or a hobby for the eccentric. It is a practical good for the world. The work of the artist is an expression of hope - it is homage to the value of human life, and it is vital to society. Art is a sacred expression of human creativity that shares the same ontological ground as all human work. Art, along with all work is the ordering of creation toward the intention of the creator.”

— Michael Gungor

“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”

— Kenneth Tynan

“A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.”

— Rhianna Pratchett

“Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.”

— Stefan Zweig

“I love Monet: his 'Water Lilies' would look great on my wall. But would I prefer to see money helping kids get better from cancer rather than spending it on a work of art for my own personal indulgence? Yes, I probably would.”

— Bonnie Langford

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”

— James Joyce

“Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be. The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion; talent is the gift of conveying that emotion”

— James Joyce

“I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000 ... ' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by.”

— Jean Pigozzi

“What I do, basically, is look at things from different angles. That is what I do on stage comedically, and that is what I do in art. I was always fascinated by the structure of things, why things work this way and not that way. So I like to see how things behave if you change the point of view.”

— Ursus Wehrli

“Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret ... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.”

— Dan Brown

“Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work ... I decided I would make him my model ... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school.”

— David Bolinsky

“I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content ... A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art ... You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.”

— Boris Pasternak

“Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them-the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.”

— Rafael Sabatini

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.”

— Jerry Saltz

“To become a work of art is the object of living.”

— Oscar Wilde

“'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.”

— James Fenton

“The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.”

— Michael Chabon

“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?”

— Jeanette Winterson

“Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn't have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

“So worried was I that people would see through the painting into my soul - and guess at secret Alison stuff - that I scraped the paint off the canvas. It was too risky to expose what everyone hides ... And yet isn't that the job of the artist? Next step is to take the risk - to work more deeply. To expose that which cannot be expressed any other way. That is art. Scary and exciting.”

— Allison Mackie

“Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”

— Florence Nightingale

“If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.”

— Mark Edward

“No greater care is required upon any works than upon such as are to withstand the action of water; for this reason, all parts of the work need to be done exactly according to the rules of the art which all workmen know, but few observe.”

— Frontinus

“We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts ... The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle ... is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician.”

— George Balanchine

“The sad thing is that somehow, it is a type of event that mirrors the artist. You take it into account, and you're reminded in this specific case what the artist's work is about, what his life is like, and how life mirrors art.”

— Massimiliano Gioni

“The person who appreciates a great work of art has the feeling that the work grows in him as he becomes involved in a prolonged capturing of emerging marginal meanings. He feels that he, too, is creative, that he himself is adding to his experience and understanding. Moreover, he wants to confront the work of art many times. He is not easily tired of it, as he would be had he read a purely logical statement. He realizes that the work of art does not merely transmit information; it produces pleasure.”

— Silvano Arieti

“What is your real work? Is it that which pays the bills or is it your art? I think your real work is healing. Whatever helps you become more loving in this lifetime. Whatever helps you forgive yourself, embrace yourself, meet yourself, and free yourself in this lifetime.”

— Tama J. Kieves

“In my opinion in art nothing can go too far as long as you don't physically hurt people or animals. Art is there to push boundaries. I love it when my work freaks people out but it's all fake!”

— Tom Six

“I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.”

— John Olsen

“Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of elements of two (or more) systems of interpretation. This conflict has the function of breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning.”

— Yuri Lotman

“In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.”

— Jose Clemente Orozco

“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork ... they will receive my new work als they always have when something new presents itself: with indignation and screams of scorn.”

— Kurt Schwitters

“The main difference between commissioned work and work I do for myself is that if I'm doing for myself, I don't have to worry about sticking to an art description or working for a specific audience or project.”

— Julie Dillon

“The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing.”

— Seth Godin

“Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally.”

— Seth Godin

“Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

“I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.”

— Edward Albee

“When contemplating a shield that would protect America for incoming missiles, Democrats suddenly became hardheaded fiscal conservatives. For the first time in recorded history, liberals were concerned about the cost and usefulness of a government program. These people believe federally funded art therapy for the homeless will pay for itself. That you can take to the bank. But a shield to repel incoming nuclear missiles from American soil they said, was too expensive and wouldn't work.”

— Ann Coulter

“Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.”

— Anne Waldman

“You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“Your work speaks for you. Your art defines you.”

— Oprah Winfrey

“Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.”

— Havelock Ellis

“Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art.”

— William Wordsworth

“Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.”

— Robert Anton Wilson