Purpose and value of art quotes
Art serves many purposes and values, ranging from:
- aesthetic as it pleases our senses,
- functional as it influences behavior,
- personal as it can fix you,
- political as it can mock authority/status quo.
It can be a medium of beauty, allowing artists to convey emotions and critique society, but it can also contribute to corruption (artwashing) or gentrification. Economically, art possesses value as a commodity, contributing to markets.
Below is a selection of quotes about the value of art in authors' alphabetical order
Alan Moore
"I know that sounds harsh and confrontational but if art doesn't surprise you, then all it is doing is reassuring you and reconfirming your prejudices."
Alexon Bell
"Art and antiques are easy to store and transport;
Rare art can be worth millions, which means it is a great mechanism to store and transfer wealth;
Art can be stored safely in custom-built, highly-secure warehouses (normally in Free Ports or Free Trade Zones) which means that criminals assets are secure;
Art and antiques tend to appreciate in value, which means that money is not lost in the laundering process, it's actually gained;
There are no asset registers for art so the ownership and exchange of fine art and antiques are very hard to trace."
✒ “Deploying innovative technology could help combat the dark art of money laundering”
Amy Cappellazzo
Chairman of the fine art division of Sotheby’s
“That’s all toward a greater efficiency like the market wants it. The market is like the weather, you can’t fight the weather, you can just learn to be smart and predicting a little bit or prepare yourself for it but you have to sort of go with the force of the market itself.”
Antony Gormley
“I was really tired of art about art.“
“It’s very, a strange idea about human imagination that actually art is only permissible by what has just happened in the generation before. Life isn’t like that.”
“If we think about Mondrian, or Kandinsky, or even somebody like Klee. They were trying to find a language that really was universal. That could somehow re-animate life, by giving us things that we could relate to immediately.”
✒ "Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Antony Gormley"
- Dec 20, 2014, Zentrum Paul Klee
Ben Jeffery
“The business of the modern artist is itself an exemplary form of cutting-edge enterprise: dependent on brand-identity, self-commodification, opportunism, novelty, relentless networking, and a heavily blurred line between life and work.”
-
✒ “Ancient Curse” article about Michel Houellebecq “The Map and the Territory” Nplusone magazine
Chase Purdy
“Artists stopped showing us the truth about farming and it’s hurting the planet. Art is a reflection of humanity. It helps us understand ourselves—our beauty and our scars—and also the world in which we live. There’s nothing picturesque about how most people are fed today, but you wouldn’t know it from our grocery packaging, or from popular culture, or from the myths we’ve created in our own minds about where our food comes from.” . “Where are the artists? We need them.”
✒Chase Purdy, Food Writer for Quartz
Edward Winkleman
“As the art market has become increasingly global, lucrative, and hence more sophisticatedly manipulated, I've begun to realize that business basics alone are not sufficient instruction for helping BFA and MFA graduates are fully prepared for the market that awaits them. No, to enter the new art world armed with the knowledge that will make you truly successful, artists must acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the science of branding.”
✒ Stropheus Art Law on YouTube
Glenn Adamson
"So the reason it's (The book) called a “Fewer, Better Things” is that I had this idea that if we're going to carry on in our economy and in our artistic lives and in general, particularly given the realities of climate change, we're going to have to find a way to instill a smaller number of objects with a greater amount of value."
✒ Glenn Adamson, ThinkCraft: Glenn Adamson Keynote
Jordan B. Peterson
“The thing about artists, and it is a hard thing to balance in our culture, is that artists are unbelievably productive economically but it is very very hard for them to monetize their productivity. So even though what they produce can be of an incalculable value it’s very difficult for them to get any of the economic value that they’re produced actually directed towards them. It’s a major problem with trade openness as a mode of being in the world”
Jacques Rancière
Art does not exist in itself; it is an outcome of a complex set of relationships between what one is allowed to say, to perceive, and to understand. Events and objects only exist within the fabric of discourse and are perceived as art, or a revolution in art, only within this fabric.
(...)
Art is a work on the distribution of the sensible. Sometimes, but not very often, it rearranges the set of perception between what is visible, thinkable, and understandable, and what is not. This is the politics of art.
✒Versobooks "The Politics of Art" Interview by Anna Wójcik
Jessica Morgan
“I don't think we ever begin to work with an artist thinking out it would affect their market. It’s completely not what's on our minds. But it would be naive to say that we're completely unconscious of what these ramifications are.”
✒ Jessica Morgan Director of Dia Art foundation - Interview Artload
Leo Gura
“In a way, art is like lubrication for the engine of humanity. Without art, the engine would just run and it would quickly burn itself out because you might think like well an engine is very mechanical it's got these hard edges and it just kind of works very mechanically and robotically. That's true but also without that organic component of oil lubricating all the parts how quickly will your engine break almost instantly you see you need that lubrication you need that sort of soft-touch."
✒ Leo Gura, Understanding The Essence Of Art - actualized
Liron Yanconsky
"I don't see a lot of people discuss this kind of topics, the meeting of business and art, but you have to understand whatever you do, if you're trying to make money there is an offer taking place because you provide something in return to something else."
Marc Premo
“We are in the postmodern era now, we’re in the crisis of meaning. The crisis of representation is watercolours and Cape Cod which I have nothing against, but if your art is only about what it looks like it probably isn’t art. So maybe you should sell that and have a steak dinner.”
✒ Creative Mornings HQ, Jan 3, 2016
Martin Herbert
"Nevertheless, such self-detaching on the part of the artist goes somewhere. As performed today, it pushes against the current in an epoch of celebrity worship and its related feedback loop, increasingly universal visibility and access. A big part of the artist's role now, in a massively professionalized art world, is showing up to self-market, being present."
✒ “Tell Them I Said No” Sternberg Press 2016
Richard Tuttle
“Human beings make artificial structures in face of nature. It's quite curious because the popular idea of the artist is they are radical or bohemian or revolutionary or rebels. And that's part of the reason why they don't get a good contract you know because they're marginalized their value is lowered. But I find that the best artists are the most disciplined people I've ever encountered.”
✒ Louisiana channel Interview "Artists Are Like Clouds"
Samuel R. Delany
"The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values,
can force it to change"
✒ Samuel R. Delany "The Empire Star"
Scarlett Johansson
"Art Should Be Immune to Political Correctness”
✒ Asifmagazine - GettyImages
Stefan Ruitenbeek
“Because art is duty-free. You can’t improve the world with art, and because you implement this false premise, you’re not just failing to help society you also make art dull”
✒Youtube - KIRAC 13 Stigma (The Netflix deal) youtube
Stuart Semple
"Art is free. It adds richness to lived experience; it can be the icing on the cake without having to save any lives or the world. It can get lost and it can fail beautifully. It can be pathetic and that’s why I love it.”
✒ Stuart Semple, Flaunt Magazine -Interview by Melissa Mellati, photo Sarah Morris
Tak Pham
"How much are the artists to blame? Not very much, I think. (...) I would take the commission, too. It is a known fact that artists’ careers in Canada are precarious and unsustainable—few artists and cultural workers can afford to say no to any money."
✒ takpham.com
Trent Kaniuga
“I want to talk about increasing your value every single day through small actionable items that are increasing your skill, your understanding, your knowledge, your network, your speed, your technical ability, but you have to do it with focus in the direction of the career path or the art goal that you want to meet because if you don’t define your goals and what you want out of your artistic career somebody else will decide it for you."
✒ His YouTube channel
Uli Sigg
“The commodification of art, some people say of art hard production, becoming a kind of industry so we see this globally, we also see it in China. For very long this was not the case because they had not been any market and that is what ideal is considered the pure art making: there is no commercial element to it. The fact there is a commercial aspect to art does not necessarily mean that the art is less interesting or less meaningful but it may very often mean that. But it doesn’t lead by necessity to art that is of lesser quality."
✒ Uli Sigg - Interview by CGTN (youtube)
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