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Art Related Quotes...
"From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. "The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. "The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. "But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown--a mountebank. "I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."
- Pablo Picasso 1952
"Then very slowly I go to slightly lighter colors until little by little, the forms begin to take shape and I start to see what is happening.
Since I never plan in advance but rather, simply let myself be led by instinct, and taste and intuition.
And it is in this manner that I find myself creating visions that I have never before imagined.
And little by little certain color effects develop that excite me and I find the painting itself leading me on and I become only an instrument of a greater, wiser force...or being...or intelligence than I myself am."
- Eyvind Earle
"Artists and critics compete with each other in their endeavors to destroy the traditional approach to the fundamental principles required for the careful technical execution of any work. In their mad pursuit of novelty, they do not have enough time for a conscientious development of their ideas and, as a result, they have had to make legitimate that which I would call 'illiteracy' in the arts"
- Nicolai Fechin
"The appearance of a truly new idea in art is always valuable, but only when it aims at fulfilling itself in an accomplished piece of work."
- Nicolai Fechin
"It is always a temptation for a beginner to take the path of least resistance. He usually takes as his model the reproductions of some fashionable painter and copies them, believing by so doing he acquires knowledge. Such a beginning is unsound, because it starts with the end-product of the original work - the finished results of an artist's long and patient toil. Superficially absorbing this final expression of work, the student overlooks the process of attaining these results and does not comprehend at all the work of creating."
- Nicolai Fechin
"...the young bureaucrat-in-training, as he progresses in the bureaucratic hierarchy, will discover - some quickly; others, their eventual lackeys, with less speed - that success comes not from pleasing the audience but from placating his superiors until that time it is reasoned effective to betray them.
He learns, in short, to bide his time.
And as time goes by, this suborned young person becomes each day less capable of first uttering and then framing a non-bureaucratic thought.
Impulses of joy, of wonder, indeed, of rage and grief are repressed until they are no longer consciously felt.
This is called "growing savvy.""
- David Mamet
"Must all human conglomerations become corrupt? Past a certain point they seem to - that point beyond which each person in the group no longer knows the names of all the others."
- David Mamet