Art Quotes

“Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.”

-- Oscar Wilde

“Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.”

-- Russell Simmons

“So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die that is to say, civilization will die.”

-- William Morris

“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.”

-- George Edward Moore

“The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.”

-- E. M. Forster

“There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.”

-- Steve Martin

“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”

-- Havelock Ellis

“My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.”

-- Paul Getty

“At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.”

-- Brian Eno