Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105
“The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed.”
Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101 (quotation is from Goethe)
Context: The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed. The element of surprise is based on this. "So true, so filled with being" [So wahr, so seiend] is not something one knows any other way. Everything familiar is eclipsed. To understand what the work of art says to us is therefore a self-encounter.
Original
Das Kunstwerk, das etwas sagt, konfrontiert uns mit uns selbst. Das will sagen, es sagt etwas aus, das so, wie es da gesagt wird, wie eine Entdeckung ist, d.h. die Aufdeckung von etwas Verdecktem. Darauf beruht jene Betroffenheit. «So wahr, so seiend» ist nichts, was man sonst kennt. Alles Bekannte ist übertroffen. Verstehen, was einem das Kunstwerk sagt, ist also gewiß Selbstbegegnung.
Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964)
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Hans-Georg Gadamer 16
German philosopher 1900–2002Related quotes

As quoted in The Art of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1972) by Reinhold Heller

“Express thyself! Say something loudly! Aaaaaaah!
What's in that room, Sonny?”
Song lyrics, Prayers on Fire (1981), King Ink
Quote from: Jasper Johns in Tokyo, Yoshiaki Tono, Tokyo August 1964, as cited in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 101
1960s
Hulme and Modrern Poetry' in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
1910s
Source: 'Merz Painting' (1919); as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 91.