The world is a slightly better place for having improvisation in it than it was before. There's something about it that says something positive about the human spirit, that a bunch of people can get together and by following a few simple traffic rules can create art and can entertain an audience and can thrill and exalt each other.
My art is a disciplined high dive - high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual... my dialogue.
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking.
The Iranians and Persians are excellent at the art of negotiation.
Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
As awkward as it is to manoeuvre a ladder around the squared circle, there is an incredible art to 'excellently executing' a ladder match.
I was never much of a musical theater guy, but I have so much more respect for the art form, the physical exertion of doing eight shows on Broadway a week, I cannot even fathom it.
Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
I'll read a book. I'll watch a documentary or a film or whatever. I'll go to an art exhibit and just try and open myself to influence.
The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.
I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism. I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition; it's amazing.
I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.
