Northrop Frye: Quotes about art

Northrop Frye was Canadian literary critic and literary theorist. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Northrop Frye: 274 quotes3 likes

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
Context: A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

“Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts,”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities.

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 7

“Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.”

Northrop Frye

Fables of Identity (1963)
"Quotes"

“There is a curious law of art…that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.”

Northrop Frye

“Design as a Principle in the Arts”, The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975, p. 232
"Quotes"

“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of "quaint" and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts…Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.”

Northrop Frye

"The Secular Scripture" and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, p. 164
"Quotes"

“Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 149

“Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world.”

Northrop Frye

1:73
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“A community`s art is its spiritual vision.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 206

“No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland

“One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 7

“Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 8

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.”

Northrop Frye book Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction