Leonard Bernstein Quotes

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

A good piece of art raises questions.

What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

All art is at once surface and symbol.