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Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
-Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
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Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.
-Lindsay Anderson
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Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
-Guillaume Apollinaire
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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
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Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.
-Rudolph Arnheim
Entropy and Art (final words), 1971
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Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.
-Jean Arp
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Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
-Francis Bacon
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
-James Baldwin
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
-James Baldwin
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The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! --this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
-Honore de Balzac
Cousin Bette
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If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
-Honore de Balzac
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The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.
-Lester Bangs
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Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
-Daniel Barenboim
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The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure
-Mikhail Baryshnikov
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Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.
-Jacques Barzun
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A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
-Charles Baudelaire
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In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
-Simone de Beauvoir
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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
-Ludwig van Beethoven
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No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
-Ludwig van Beethoven
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As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.
-Saul Bellow
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Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
-Saul Bellow
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
-Walter Benjamin
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The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
-John Berger
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Books about Art
