Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Context: Reason... to suppose any production, worthy to be called a work of art, can be made without its use is foolish.... By the use of reason many mistakes in design may be avoided and many counterfeits of art readily detected.... Beauty alone is an excellent reason for many things, but when a design is in direct conflict with common sense it cannot be a work of art.
“the vase once had an extremely common use. Most probably it was used for cooking-oil. It was made by a designer of those times, when art and life went hand in hand and there was no such thing as a work of art to look at and just any old thing to use. I”
Source: Design as Art
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Bruno Munari 1
Italian artist and designer 1907–1998Related quotes
Diary entry (December 1904), # 583, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910
Quote of Cassatt, after her trip to Egypt, 1910; as cited by Nancy Mowll Mathews, in Mary Cassatt: A Life, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, p. 291 - ISBN 978-0-585-36794-1
As quoted in On the Art of the Theatre http://books.google.pl/books?id=ZQv533ZK6IQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (2009), p. 53.
Quote
"Physicist, Purge Thyself" in the Chicago Tribune Magazine (22 June 1969)
Various interviews
Context: I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.
Old Black Kettle from the Tennessee Mountain Home album
Song lyrics