Art Theorist

Quotes & Thinkers in Art Theorist

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

101 quotes

🇫🇷Guy Debord

Philosophy

Situationist International

1931–1994

"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning."

24 quotes

🇫🇷Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophy

structuralism

1908–1961

"It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession."

"One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values."

"I don't paint things. I only paint the differences between things."

"Well, we will indeed see how things develop and what will become of our art! In any case, artists should remain apolitical and only think of their work and dedicate all their energies to this work."

"I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few."

"..the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation."

"By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life."

"Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal."

"Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom."

30 quotes

🇺🇸Christopher Alexander

Philosophy

1936–2022

"In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low."

"He couldn't look after himself properly. He was terrible thin, and seemed to live mostly on currants and vegetable stew, because he followed the Haye diet."

"Links to online museum images of all of Dürer's prints"

"Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City"

"Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or "dematerialized."

"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."

"Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished."

"Los Angeles County Museum of Art Database, LACMA"

"Fetch me my seven-league boots so I can catch the children."

11 quotes

🇬🇧Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)

"Experience teaches us that the eye may be subdued and forced into forming and disposing of objects even quite contrary to what it would naturally see them, by pre judgement of the mind or some other persuasive motive."

"The profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves.. ..everything is contained in the beauty of the work."

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others."

"All content of science, and also their protocol statements that are used for verification, are selected on the basis of decisions and can be altered in principle."

"Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart."

"If one wanted to make a work of art devoid of meaning, it would be impossible because we’ve already given meaning to the work by indicating that it’s a work of art."

"I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men."

".. the overturning of the old world of arts will be etched across your 'palms'"

"Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century."

"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. There remains madness, 'the madness that one locks up', as it has aptly been described. That madness or another.."