Visual Arts Quotes

“I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?

The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life?

The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

“We create art, and those artworks shape us into what we are. We, as human beings, are capable of creating art. Or, perhaps, because of these arts, we have the capacity to become humans humanely.”
― Ashmita Acharya, Art Adventure: Visual Arts

“The problem is not that erotically charged images
can’t also be seen as culturally valuable expressions (they
can), but that woman’s highest cultural expression has been
as a passive sex object, and not as an artist or creator of
culture herself. This has limited what women have been able
to achieve in a patriarchal society that cannot separate
women’s value and worth from a very fixed idea of their
sexuality.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

“For me, visuals are as important as the music. I just love escapism and giving people something to escape to. To me, that's what art is.”
― Iggy Azalea

“No camera can capture, what your eyes capture.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“[We are]expected to be wooed and seduced by the male artist’s libidinous vision, a vision that has dominated and come to define our perception of genius, beauty and value from the perspective of the white
heterosexual male artist.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

“Picasso and Modigliani’s ‘Venuses’ represent a sort of iconoclasm in their self-conscious rejection of the cold, perfectly-finished, stuffy beauty of the Western tradition of art. For the contemporary viewer they have become a reassuring confirmation of left-of-centre politics, of anti-establishment positions and of an intellectual kudos that doesn’t need art to look classical to be meaningful. And the frankness of the male artist’s unflinchingly libidinal vision is taken as evidence of the separation from restrictive bourgeois respectability and taste.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies