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“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”
― Pablo Picasso

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”
― Henri Matisse

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he is an artist in divining a great deal from the little that he has felt. Artist are by no means people of great passion, but they frequently present themselves as such, unconsciously sensing that others give greater credence to the passions they portray if the artist's own life testifies to his experience in this area. We need only let ourselves go, not control ourselves, give free play to our wrath or our desire, and the whole world immediately cries: how passionate he is! But there really is something significant in a deeply gnawing passion that consumes and often swallows up an individual: whoever experiences this surely does not describe it in dramas, music, or novels. Artists are frequently unbridled individuals, insofar, that is, as they are not artists: but that is something different.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.”
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

“Art is the expression of an enormous preference.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage.

This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason.”
― John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art, Vol. 3: History as Nightmare

“At different times I've worked in different mediums. For me, the variation is not an artistic judgment, but a necessary choice. It's just as normal to eat with chopsticks, as it is to eat with forks or hands. Different circumstances call for different tools. I try to express ideas with the most appropriate available materials and forms. Very often the medium comes first, and then my reasons for it. Sometimes, I work with a medium I don't like out of curiosity. It is an experiment to challenge my pre-existing concepts and tastes. I've taken hundreds and thousands of photographs, and it's not because I like the medium. I wanted something to parallel my daily activities, and photography is the most logical way of doing that. I filmed documentaries because the medium reflects real conditions the most completely. I don't think artists should only work with what is handiest and most familiar, because the unfamiliar provides a challenge, and it creates another language. It defines the condition for new possibilities.”
― Ai Weiwei

“Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't.

Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“People make the mistake of supposing that genius is complicated. It is the opposite. We regular folks are complicated â€� tied in knots of ambivalence and befogged with uncertainties. Genius has the economy of a machine with a minimum of moving parts. Everything about Picasso came to bear when he drew a line.”
― Peter Schjeldahl

“The Artwork as Misunderstanding
There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along.
As if there was something to take off.”
― Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings: Notes And Texts

“I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalised and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).”
― Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts

“Because we are all human and there by share a
neurological apparatus of vision which we can take, save for cases of obvious malfunction, as behaving in the same way for everyone, there seems no reason to doubt that what a painter understands by, say, a hand
is exactly what everyone understands by it. Yet how can we be sure that visual experience is universally similar? What guarantees the guarantee?”
― Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze

“A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians.”
― E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition

“If art were everything, it would be a good evil, a worthless treasure, a virtuous vice, a healthy sickness, and a meaningful meaninglessness.”
― Ryan Muldowney and Jacob Muldowney

“Because most art relies upon sensorial cues, most art is a manifestation of empiricism. The senses form the tools that allow both the artist and the scientist to understand the nature of their subject. Observable data, and the interpretation of that observable data, is as fundamental to an artist as it is to a scientist.”
― Ryan Muldowney and Jacob Muldowney

“Spontaneity, intuition, happenstance, instinct, and even occasional dumb luck are often valued highly by artists, but only insofar as these things can be utilized to serve a larger, deliberative vision. All art is intentional, not incidental, and therefore art does not happen by accident, even if artists are willing to exploit accidents.”
― Ryan Muldowney and Jacob Muldowney

“I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalism and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).”
― Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings: Notes And Texts

“I immerse myself in sketching on my phone, tapping my stylus against the corner when I’m thinking through my design. I love the way there’s direction and guidance for something as wild and emotional as art, so some of my favorite books to read are on art theory.
But the best learning comes from practice, after being guided by the lessons in the books.”
― Julie Abe, The Charmed List

“When I begin, I draw rougher, more jagged lines to get out my excess energy before I can focus on what I see before me. Before I can study the angles and get them right, before my practice and proper theory sets in.”
― Julie Abe, The Charmed List

“Magritte’s variations on the same theme invite us to rethink conventional notions of originality, to look more carefully at the details and contrasts between different versions of the painting: we observe the architectural variations of the Belgian houses, the varieties of trees in the foreground, of the streetlamps and their shadows, and of the skyscapes.

Some of these paintings are in portrait format, others in landscape; some, like the 1961 version, give the viewer a deeper sense of proximity to, or immersion in, the scene while in others the depicted world is more distant. Together, these variant paintings form an internal system of poetic rhythms and patterns in which cross-references abound, alongside allusions to older Belgian art, most notably La Maison rose (1892) by the symbolist William Degouve de Nuncques.”
― Sotherby's

“Hasta en la reproducción más perfecta siempre faltará algo: el aquí y ahora de la obra de arte.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purposeâ€�.”
― Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction

“Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. Such people, he felt, eventually will reach consensus, and in doing so, they set a ‘standard of tasteâ€� which is universal. â€� Hume said men of taste must ‘preserve minds free from prejudiceâ€�, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or ‘vicious mannersâ€� in art â€� Kant too spoke about judgements of taste but he was more concerned with explaining judgements of Beauty.
He aimed to show that good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in us and our preferences. Kant tried to describe our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. There is a complex interplay among our mental faculties including perception, imagination, and intellect or judgement. Kant held that in order to function in the world to achieve our human purposes, we label much of what we sense, often in fairly unconscious ways.”
― Cynthia A. Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Cynthia Freeland, Oxford University Press

“Above all, the function of art is catharsis, purification: emotions accumulated in us under the pressure of social restraints, and liable to sudden issue in unsocial and destructive action, are touched off and sluiced away in the harmless form of theatrical excitement ; so tragedy, "through pity and fear, effects the proper purgation of these emotions." Aristotle [...] in this theory of catharsis he has made a suggestion endlessly fertile in the understanding of the almost mystic power of art.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Aristotle's Philosophy; 39