Thoughts on Art

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
-Pablo Picasso

Art is about paying attention.
-Laurie Anderson

Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method.
-Richard Serra

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn't make it. It was almost like it was made already...the challenge is more about trying to make what you can't think of.
-Cindy Sherman

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
-Francis Bacon

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
-Robert Motherwell

The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his [her] contribution to the creative act.
-Marcel Duchamp

It's easy to be an artist in your head. Do more.
-David Salle

Art is the only way to run away, without leaving home.
-Twyla Tharp

I am concerned with who speaks and who is silent and with work that addresses the material conditions and social relations that comprise what we call life.
-Barbara Kruger

Art= Man [Woman]= Creativity= Freedom. Every man [woman] is creative and hence he [she] is free. Freedom and creativity make him [her] fundamentally able to determine, to form and to change. This is true both in the realm of art- whose task is to create awareness of such possibilities- and in society.
-Joseph Beuys

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust

Art isn't everything, it's just about everything.
-Gertrude Stein

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
-Oscar Wilde

Make a work look like play.
-Cindy Sherman

Learn to recognize when you need to know something.
-Bruce Nauman

For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
-Rudyard Kipling

Try to keep yourself off balance because the process allows for a certain amount of discovery.
-Benny Andrews

Ask yourself a problem where you can't turn to someone else.
-Chuck Close

The viewer becomes more involved as the art becomes more of a puzzle.
-Will Insley

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
-Barbara Kruger

Art comes from not believing in what is going on in this world.
-Nancy Spero

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
-Thomas Merton

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.
-Pablo Picasso

To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
-Georgia O'Keefe

The meanings of things aren't stable. Anything can mean almost anything.
-Jasper Johns

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
-Damien Hirst

Education for creativity is nothing short of education for living.
-Erich Fromm

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like, really means, I don't know anything about art, but I like what I know.
-Anonymous

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
-Charlie Chaplin

Painting...is one of the surest, most direct forms of communication known to man.
-Stuart Davis

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
-Robert Smithson

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti