But of course there's no shortage of people who are capable of being moved by bad art. I mean, the world is full of bad art and people love it. I don't think popularity can be cited as a standard of achievement in art.
Recently my secretary came to work one morning and she said that her little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch and said "Mom, I feel just like Charlie Brown." And all of the sudden it occurred to me after all of these years, this is the purpose of Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is somewhat like a line of poetry. That little boy then, did not have to talk anymore about his feelings. The mother knew exactly how he felt. And I suppose this could be the reason for Charlie Brown's existence. If someone says to you "Boy, I feel just like Charlie Brown today" you know how he feels.
I suppose when a composer is composing well, the music is coming faster than he can think of it. And when I have a good idea, I can hardly get the words down fast enough. I'm afraid that they will leave me before I get them down on the paper. And sometimes, um, my hand will literally shake with excitement as I'm drawing it because I'm having a good time. Unfortunately this does not happen every day.
I studied art in a correspondence course because I was afraid to go to art school. I couldn't see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I, and this way I was protected by drawing at home and simply mailing my drawing in and having them criticize.
I wish I had a better education, but I think that my entire background made me well suited for what I do. If I could write better than I can, perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist, and I might have become a failure. If I could draw better than I can, I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist, and would have failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist.
"I knew that Humbolt would die soon, because I had seen him on the street two months before. And he had death all over him. He didn't see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had brought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch." James Atlas (Biographer): Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York, and was appraised by T.S Elliot as the poet of his generation. This amazing, sudden, precocious recognition. But Delmore also became a symbol of the artist in America who's doomed by the pressures of capitalism and has to be crazy because he's a poet. Saul Bellow: People like that have no proper place in American life. They just don't. This is a high tech, high finance, rationally organized kind of society in which people normally don't have such motives as Humbolt had. They just don't. He himself looks upon himself as an alien object, because he was aware that he does not guide his life by the standards that prevail. But in his saner moments, I would have thought that he would say that art was something that life couldn't do without. Uh, there was not this sort of divorce at at all. But that um, um, art was one of the powers that made life life. I think we all believe that. I think I still do.
Reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on ever drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
The thing about Deford Bailey, Ray Charles, and Charlie Pride, the two or three black people who were known to be in country music. They were accepted. The musicians accepted them at a time when the culture did not accept. There's a truth in the music. And it's too bad that we, as a culture, have not been able to address that truth. That's the shame of it. The art tells more of the tale of us coming together.
The same people that have stripped us of our identity, and labeled us as a color, have told us what it means to be black, and the vernacular that we are supposed to have.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
One of the cardinal pleasures of life is offered to man by works of art. Art, at its highest potential, as the projection of things as they might and ought to be, can provide man with an invaluable emotional fuel. But, again, the kind of art works one responds to, depends on one's deepest values and premises.
We must teach ourselves…to see the beauty of the commonplace. It is so much greater to make much out of little than to make little out of much - Better to make a big thing out of a little subject than to make a little thing out of a big one.
Ultimately, there are two things to consider when judging whether something is art or pornography: the way the art makes an individual feel and the intention of the artist. The first may be easier for a child to figure out than the second. While art is intended to create awe for the human body as a whole, pornography is created with the hope that the viewer’s attention will focus only on body parts (the parts normally covered by a swimsuit.) Art may have many purposes. Pornography only has one: to create or intensify sexual feelings. But children are not developmentally prepared for such feelings. They might describe porn’s effect on them as a strong desire to see more. Children might experience a disorienting, intense fascination they can’t get out of their mind. It’s important for parents to talk to children about their feelings and listen. An image that isn’t pornography for parents may still be pornography for a child.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. ~ Albert Einstein
...I think the biggest thrill in life is to have a dream or imagine something and then get to see it be real.
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
We have art to save ourselves from the truth.
"one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the right of Art." ~ Madame Morrible
"the real power of art, I think (is) not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?" ~ Elphaba (The Wicked Witch of the West)
Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. The number of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.
Experience has taught me that the more specifically I phrase the requests and instructions that I direct to my subconscious, the more successful the exercise will become.
There is a fine line between sensitivity and sentimentality…Sensitivity seems to touch and uplift the listener, while sentimentality goes one step too far and plays on the listener's emotions in an uncomfortable way.
The purpose of art is to bring people into presence.
Selection and combination are learned from nature herself, who constantly presents us with compositions of her own, far more beautiful than the happiest arranged by human skill.
The true artist works in great gusts of effort, and in smaller gusts of apparent lassitude. He is not lying about waiting for some inspiration. He is in the travail of the dreamer entering into expression.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare.
This is what Mormons call “gospel art,” and they revere it less for its artistic merits and more for its religious purpose — to convey the message and doctrine of Mormonism, which binds its 15 million members worldwide.
Yes, it is kitsch, but so what? They are not about artistic expression, but about community, about prayer, about devotional feeling. Theses images are the intimate symbols of the community of feeling to which (Mormons) belong.
Mormons are not the only religious group to bring a specific gaze to religious art, he said, but they bring one that is different from other Protestant groups that have embraced new forms of art and media.
First, it’s important to understand that porn is the opposite of true art. True art, whether it’s visual, auditory or written, invites a person to think, to ponder, to wonder or to consider something new, a different perspective perhaps. Art doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful, but it should say something of worth. Something to enlighten us. Great artists are also great thinkers.
I beg to differ. This is not good art. It’s the opposite of art! Any media that attempts to shock, titillate, create sensation for sensation’s sake, and portray gratuitous horror is not good art. Porn is the opposite of art because it portrays sexual scenes that tap into one’s libido instead of one’s heart and mind.
Pornography may be memorable, even for a lifetime. But it’s meant to shock, titillate and addict, rather to enlighten us about what it means to be a thinking, ethical, empathetic human being.
1. Define pornography as not only what it is but how it makes you feel. Does it cause a physical excitement? Does it make you want to look at other nude pictures? 2. Teach kids that porn focuses on parts of the body, but good, true art focuses on the entire person as a unique human being. Does this picture cause you to focus on the private parts more than the entire body? Is there a reason the person is portrayed without clothes on? (For example, it’s reasonable that a painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden would show them without clothes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) 3. Art exalts the human form and portrays it with awe and respect. Porn degrades the human body–again, using artificially enhanced bodies to arouse sexual feelings that may cause you want to act out on those feelings. 4. Good, true art makes us want to do something positive–for example, right a wrong, reflect on our own mistakes, or appreciate beauty. Pornography, on the other hand, wants to create or intensify sexual feelings and pull us into a self-centered and ultimately destructive lust.
...the question of what one should make is always superior, in point or order and logic, to the question of how to make it.
Pursuing your art can limit your income - though hopefully only in the early stages. While you need to be responsible and thus perhaps move toward earning money from your art, you also need support from people who get it (that you are a talented - let's hope - driven artist or writer). Gravitate toward people who can be supportive of artists. You will find it helps your art tremendously.
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.
But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play.
Any attempt to extend the subject matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses.
In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and, as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism.
There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea. He should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express. If his will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through.
The work is done when that special thing has been said.
No feature should be started until you have fully comprehended its character and have established in your mind the manner of its full accomplishment.
The picture must not become a patchwork of parts of various moods. The original mood must be held to.
All the beauty that can exist in the background rests in its relation to the figure.
We are instinctively blind to what is not relative. We are not cameras. We select. We do this always when we are not painting. When you are sitting in conversation with a young girl and are thinking the while how beautiful she is, suddenly stop and ask yourself what has been her background.
We must paint only what is important to us, must not respond to outside demands. They do not know what they want, or what we have to give.
If a man has the soul of an artist he needs a mastery of all the means of expression so that he may command them, for with his soul in activity he has much to say.
The whole fact is that art and science are so close akin that they might very well be lumped together. They are certainly necessary to each other and the delights of either pursuit should satisfy any man.
An artist should not be afraid of his tools.
I am not interested in art as a means of making a living, but I am interested in art as a means of living a life.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways.
It is true, no doubt, that if my writer is deflected from writing to dancing or painting, somewhat of his genius will appear in these arts.
Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways...If one is a painter this purest freedom must exist at the time of painting. This is as much as to say that a painter may give up his hope of making his living as a painter but must make it some other way. This is generally true, although some do, by a freak of appreciation, make enough while going their way to live sufficiently well. Perhaps this happens, but I am not sure but that there is some curtailing of the purity of the freedom.
I was once asked by a young artist whether he could hope to make any money out of his work if he continued in his particular style of painting. He happened to be a man of considerable talent and had great enthusiasm for his work. But I knew there was no public enthusiasm for such work. I remembered he had told me that before he got really into art he had made a living by designing labels for cans, tomato cans and the like. I advised him to make tomato-can labels and live well that he might be free to paint as he liked.
Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways...If one is a painter this purest freedom must exist at the time of painting. This is as much as to say that a painter may give up his hope of making his living as a painter but must make it some other way. This is generally true, although some do, by a freak of appreciation, make enough while going their way to live sufficiently well. Perhaps this happens, but I am not sure but that there is some curtailing of the purity of the freedom. I was once asked by a young artist whether he could hope to make any money out of his work if he continued in his particular style of painting. He happened to be a man of considerable talent and had great enthusiasm for his work. But I knew there was no public enthusiasm for such work. I remembered he had told me that before he got really into art he had made a living by designing labels for cans, tomato cans and the like. I advised him to make tomato-can labels and live well that he might be free to paint as he liked.
Like to do your work as much as a dog likes to gnaw a bone and go at it with equal interest and exclusion of everything else.
Trading art has always been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the Art Mating Ritual – attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting as Bohemians and renegades.
If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.
Expensive pictures are primarily what economists call positional goods — things that are valuable largely because other people can’t have them. The painting on the wall, or the sculpture in the garden, is intended to say as much about its owner’s bank balance as about his taste. With most kit a higher price reduces demand. But art, sports cars and fine wine invert the laws of economics. When the good that is really being purchased is evidence that the buyer has forked out a bundle, price spikes cause demand to boom.
Precisely because art is political, and can reach across divides, emphasise commonalities and foster understanding
Today’s Russian artists are one thing; Russian art is another. Shunning the country’s back catalogue means giving up a guide to the darkness, and out of it. Cancel Dostoyevsky, as an Italian university threatened to, and you miss peerless insights into nihilism and violence. Blacklist Tchaikovsky—or Shostakovich—and you silence a beauty wrenched from the chokehold of repression. Turn away from Malevich’s paintings, and you forgo his urgent vision of a world cracked open. Banishing Tolstoy means losing a timeless prophet of peace.
One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.
I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing — that it all started with a mouse.
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
We're not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public.
I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral.
Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.
All right. I'm corny. But I think there's just about a-hundred-and-forty-million people in this country that are just as corny as I am.
When we do fantasy, we must not lose sight of reality.
All we ever intended for him or expected of him was that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him. We didn't burden him with any social symbolism, we made him no mouthpiece for frustrations or harsh satire. Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.
I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us...
I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting.
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God; Referred to herself, she is genius...Our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make.
I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.
I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.
The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind.
You stand your ground and you perform your art. That's what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.
Where simplicity prevails angels hail.
Imitate nothing or nobody, paint all people and things as you see them.
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
But of course there's no shortage of people who are capable of being moved by bad art. I mean, the world is full of bad art and people love it. I don't think popularity can be cited as a standard of achievement in art.
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