“I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”— Andy Warhol, andywarholsperspective.weebly.com
“Something is happening to our species, and especially over the last 70 years. The years since 1945 have seen many horrors: the partition of India, China’s Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, the Biafran crisis, the Khmer Rouge and the Rwandan genocide, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, mass slau…”— LEIF WENAR, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
“What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.”— Amedeo Modigliani, amazon.com
“Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably…”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.”— Michelle Obama, amazon.com
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are diffe…”— Arundhati Roy, goodreads.com
“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”— Patti Smith, amazon.com
“No satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”— Martha Graham, amazon.com
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life”— Donna Tartt, amazon.com
“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”— Jeffrey Eugenides, amazon.com
“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust.”— Jennifer Egan, amazon.com
“We only have one life. If we live an awful lot of it not doing something that would make us very happy, hurts no one and might actually be worth something in the general scheme of things, it’s pretty sad if we don’t do it, just because we might get our heads kicked in.”— Frieda Hughes, theguardian.com
“Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could...”— Paulo Coelho, amazon.com
“People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them in a firmament of conventions and opinions. But poets make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the tear. But t…”— Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, amazon.com
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”— John Berger, amazon.com
“The thing about this is that sculptures like these in art history were for the male gaze. Photoshop a phone to it and suddenly she’s seen as vain and conceited. That’s why I’m 100% for selfie culture because apparently men can gawk at women but when we realize how beautiful we are we’re suddenly ful…”— Kim Kiyun, rosalarian.tumblr.com