Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn't really have judgement in it's purest form. So just go, just go.
Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.
I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table.
There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.
I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.
You don't make movies to be art movies. You make movies that move you emotionally because if you're going to commit five years of your life to a movie, you need something to keep you going.
Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.
Therefore we have to go over the fact that all human beings are afraid by what is new. It is our work to convince them that they will enjoy it, and even if they don't, to allow us just for 14 days to create that work of art.
At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.
Pollock said several times that he couldn't separate himself from his art. Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, I was much more his persona - his struggles as a human being - that was interesting to me.
Art can only be taught by artists.
It's a pity that if someone who has a really profoundly potent art to share chooses not to or doesn't fit into this very thin slice of what's desirable and marketable, chances are the public will never get a chance to hear what they're doing.
I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.
It is difficult to make political art work.
And you know, art as commerce, doesn't really make too much sense, they don't go together.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.
The most colorful section of a bookstore is the display of SF books, with art by people like Wayne Barlow, who is a terrific artist.
Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it.
Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.
I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet.
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.
Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.
There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
I'm very silly as a person, but quality silliness on-screen has more of an art to it. Harrison Ford, whom I was in 'Morning Glory' with, has mastered that dry funny better than anyone.
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
