Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Context: Why can there not be a new art founded on the only principle which can produce great art—the principle that art is the interpretation or extraction of the essence of beauty in nature, and all else is secondary?<!-- Introduction
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Friedrich Nietzsche 655
German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and cl… 1844–1900Related quotes
“The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.”
As quoted in Art Smart (2007) by Alan Bryce
Introduction.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: The essence of
MAGICK
is simple enough in all conscience. It is not otherwise with the art of government. The Aim is simply prosperity; but the theory is tangled, and the practice beset with briars.
In the same way
MAGICK
is merely to be and to do. I should add: "to suffer". For Magick is the verb; and it is part of the Training to use the passive voice. This is, however, a matter of Initiation rather than of Magick in its ordinary sense. It is not my fault if being is baffling, and doing desperate!
“Art is the most beautiful deception of all!”
Unsourced variant: Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
The Life of the Creative Spirit
Context: Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. … Let us not disillusion anyone by bringing too much reality into the dream.
Donald Judd, in: American Dialog, Vol. 1-5, (1964), p. ix
1960s
Context: Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. The one struggle in art is the struggle of artists against artists, of artist against artist, of the artist-as-artist within and against the artist-as- man, -animal, or -vegetable. Artists who claim their artwork comes from nature, life, reality, earth or heaven, as 'mirrors of the soul' or 'reflections of conditions' or 'instruments of the universe', who cook up 'new images of man' - figures and 'nature-in-abstraction' - pictures, are subjectively and objectively, rascals or rustics.
“All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Richard Long: Books, Prints, Printed Matter. Exhib cat New York Public Library, New York 1994
1990s
“At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”
Source: Elizabeth Day Damien Hirst: 'Art is childish and childlike' http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2010/sep/26/damien-hirst-art, The Guardian, 26 September 2010