Art × Consciousness

Art and Consciousness

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under art with "consciousness" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Art with "consciousness" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Art and Consciousness; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Susan Sontag, John Dewey, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other." The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrifica…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Art quotes or the concept page for Consciousness.

30 Quotes on Art and Consciousness

"The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other."

— William James

"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. ... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and synthetic sounds and industrial noises."

— Susan Sontag

"Not til the late nineteenth century was the doctrine of the subordination of time and change seriously challenged. Bergson and William James, animated by different motives and proceeding by different methods, then installed change at the very heart of things. Bergson took his stand on the primacy of life and consciousness, which are notoriously in a state of flux. He assimilated that which is completely real in the natural world to them, conceiving the static as that which life leaves behind as a deposit as it moves on. From this point of view he criticized mechanistic and teleological theories on the ground that both are guilty of the same error, although from opposite points. Fixed laws which govern change and fixed ends toward which changes tend are both the products of a backward look, one that ignores the forward movement of life. They apply only to that which life has produced and has then left behind in its ongoing vital creative course, a course whose behavior and outcome are unpredictable both mechanistically and from the standpoint of ends."

"Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?"

— Andrei Tarkovsky

"The role of the 'representational arts' - painting, sculpture, and even architecture.. ..has ended, as it is no longer necessary for the consciousness of our age, and everything art has to offer can simply be classified as a throwback."

— Lyubov Popova

"Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, Madonna's and shameless nudes.. ..has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition. I have transformed myself into the nullity of forms and pulled myself out of the circle of things, out of the circle-horizon in which the artist and forms of nature are locked."

— Kazimir Malevich

"At stake was not only a serious and viable artistic career as a woman, but the development of a subjectivity that was being defined through the self-portrait. conscious of being both muse and maker, Sher-Gil took on the position of artist and object with a double consciousness of being both."

— Amrita Sher-Gil

"All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs."

— Madeleine L'Engle

"Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page."

— Willa Cather

"Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginning-less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. ."

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

"True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life."

— Ursula K. Le Guin

"I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting.. .An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies..."

— Robert Motherwell

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

— Norman Mailer

"It is true that for us art is not an end in itself, we have lost too many of our illusions for that. Art is for us an occasion for social criticism, and for real understanding of the age we live in.. .Dada was not a school of artists, but an alarm signal against declining values, routine and speculations, a desperate appeal, on behalf of all forms of art, for a creative basis on which to build a new and universal consciousness of art."

"If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion."

— Max Scheler

"Francis must rank with those creative personalities to which all the deepest developments of Christian consciousness are due."

— Evelyn Underhill

"The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined."

— Stephen Jay Gould

"If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."

— Marcel Duchamp

"“Under the suffocating burden of the old things that should have passed away, the Christian consciousness forgets, at least in part, that all things are become new, and that man is risen from the dead."

— George Holmes Howison

"If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man."

— Václav Havel

"I don't care for 'Abstract expressionism'.. ..and it is certainly not 'non-objective', and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time.. .Painting is a state of being.. .Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."

— Jackson Pollock

"The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself."

— Madeleine L'Engle

"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all."

— Ray Bradbury

"The sex fantasies man has, the animal postures, the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - all that is part of that consciousness which is transmitted from generation to generation."

— Vātsyāyana

"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

— Max Velmans

"Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness."

— David Pearce (philosopher)

"For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience."

— Mark Rothko

"The digital revolution changed my process early on in terms of technique, but my early analog drawings and paintings had the same thematic intention as my latest digital work: the attempt to conjure, or render, a glimpse into an enigmatically layered and lively world that I sense and know to be reality, an energetic vibratory world of almost dreadful depth. In this respect, my process of making computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations have, until recently, been made up of an excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts tied to the viral form. Philosophy has been, and is, a way of freeing myself enough to connect with this depth so as to process the phantasmagorical aspects of reality into art. This process of art making, for me, must hinge on a dynamic engagement and then wedding of image production and image resistance. The idea is to encourage subversive readings of computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding safety, truth, identity and objectivity."

— Joseph Nechvatal

"To be universal you've got to stain the consciousness of the people. You've got to dig out a truth that everybody knows, but they don't want to hear, then tell it in a manner that's so articulate and so aesthetically indignant, so beautiful, that they've got to accept it back in their lives again. That's what I want to do. Touch something universal in your own language."

— James Dean Bradfield

Key thinkers on this theme

William James· Psychology Friedrich Nietzsche· Philosophy Susan Sontag· Literature John Dewey· Philosophy Andrei Tarkovsky· Entertainment

Related ideas in Art

All Art quotes Explore the idea of Consciousness