WHAT IS ART Quotes

Aya

Artist
"Art is the loudest silence. Scream quietly"

✒ VeryPrivateArt IG 2018

Blanca Pons-Sorolla

"There are people who have greater power to judge what art is and what is not, which does not mean that they have a greater capacity to do so. You have the capacity; the power is given to you. Not always the most capable are those who have the power to decide on something"

Boris Groys

Art critic, philosopher
"Popular art is made for a population consisting of spectators. Avant-garde art is made for a population consisting of artists."
✒ The Weak Universalism, 2010

Brandon Sanderson

Writer
"Art is the means by which we become what we want to be."
✒ We Are The Art, Brandon Sanderson’s Keynote Speech, YouTube, 2026

Brian Eno

Musician, Songwriter
“Art is everything you don’t have to do”
✒ Architectural Association - School of Architecture, 2016

Damilola

Kid
"I think that art is cool because you can create your own things. When I started art, I thought it was just about making it perfect, but you don’t have to care what other people say. That can still mean art to you."

✒ Damilola, What is Conceptual Art? | Tate Kids

Eric Booth

Writer
"What distinguishes art is that it happens outside of what we already know. Inherent in the artistic experience is the capacity to expand our sense of the way the world is or might be.”
✒ What Distinguishes Art and Entertainment YT Channel: Carnegie Hall, 2012

Helen Martineau

Writer
“Both artist and audience make up a work of art. Each one of us needs to come to an understanding of its deeper purpose. An artwork is not complete until it is received by others. Art lives in our response. The spectator, the listener, is as important as the doer.”

✒ Helen Martineau, Prodigal daughters

Jen Mergel

"Fine Art is as much a label as contemporary art. Really Fine Art is what you think is fine."

✒ Art Curator: Adding to the Collection - Jen Mergel Career Girls Role Model," from 2011

Leon Bolstein

"There is a long tradition of suspicion that art, first of all, is a conceit among a very small group of human beings who try to make themselves superior through a kind of Ponzi scheme of values that they all inhabit and they exclude other people from. It’s a Ponzi scheme because it really has no value at the end of the day.”

✒ Art Now (Aesthetics Across Music, Painting, Architecture, Movies, and More.) Bigthink

Marc Spiegler

"Art is not pop culture, and just because there are three times as much demand does not mean there are three times as much good art. You can distribute a sound file infinitely, or a Netflix film infinitely, but art is different. And we should always be conscious of that."
✒ Interview Artnet, 2018

Noël Carroll

“For example, there was recently that photograph of the young dead Syrian boy and I think that that photograph more than a great many newspaper editorials had had the effect of expanding the range of people who were concerned about Syrian refugees.”
✒ Interview by Debora Puac

Richard Serra

Artist
"In my later work, the person who is navigating the space, his or her experience becomes the content. So, the whole subject-object relationship is reversed. The content is you! If you don't walk into the work and engage with it, there isn't any content. That's really what I've been dealing with ever since I saw the Velazquez painting." 
✒ Article/Interview 2008: Sean O’Hagan for The Guardian

Ted Forbes

Photographer
"When defining what is art, I think it's important to remove the personal opinion from that a little bit because I think what we define as art as a society is defined by the society I know that really sounded redundant but that's how it's defined it's defined by a culture of people it's defined by a collective opinion."

✒ The Art of Photography, What is art anyway, 2014, YouTube

Tim Bengel

“It seems that many people have the feeling that only elite experts are allowed to have a real opinion on art.
This uncertainty of having your own opinion is shown quite well. A statistic which I saw in a presentation of art historian Magnus Resh: he presented that from 2007 to 2017 the number of annually sold artworks decreased by 20% and this even though the number of millionaires has more than doubled in the same time. So the problem is not the money and the problem is not the general interest in art.”
✒ Tedx Mannheim

Tom Schulman

Writer
“And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.”

✒ Dead Poets Society, 1989

Seth Godin

“By art obviously Marcel Duchamp nude descending a staircase, obviously Pablo Picasso, clearly Jackson Pollock, this is art: a human being doing something - it might not work - that connects us and draws us closer."

✒ Your Job is to Make Art - ConvertKit Craft & Commerce 2017

Victor Hugo Zayas

The best answer I've ever heard was from an 8-year-old. And this was, of course, a very smart guy, very bright little kid, I was having dinner at my friend's house. And this kid was just incredible and we were talking back and forth. I asked him, and without even thinking about it, he says, "Art is when you draw the heart of something."

✒ Art Center College Of Design