The Moral Imperative of Art

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

"Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about."

"The only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained. To explain away the mystery of a great painting – if such a feat were possible – would be irreparable harm.. .If there is no mystery than there is no 'poetry', the quality I value above all else in art. What do I mean by 'poetry'? It is to a painting what life is to man.. .For me it is a matter of harmony, of rapports, of rhythm and – most important for my own work – of 'metamorphosis'"

"There are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work, which even I don't understand, nor do I try to do so.. ..Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if – as nearly always happens – a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity that’s all to the good. French poets are particularly helpful in this respect."

"The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should."

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.”

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.”

“Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.”

"Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now."

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

"You don't make art out of good intentions."

"The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it."

“Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.”

"Art is the daughter of freedom."

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."

"Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine."

"Before Turner there was no fog in London."

"How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?"

“What was any art but a mould to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."

"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."

"To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination."

“Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.”

"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea."

"Art can never exist without naked beauty."

“Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.”

“Art is what you can get away with.”