Jon Batiste Quotes

Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made.

What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.

Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.

Frank Sinatra changed people's approach to singing. Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, van Gogh, they were all part of movements that allowed people to think about their craft differently. They changed the game. These people changed the game.

I think ceramics are so amazing because they're incredibly educational - you can buy something made in the 14th century, and it looks like it was made yesterday. There's something to be learned there, and ceramics can tell you the history of the time because they're functional vessels, ultimately.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.

The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor - his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.

Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same.

Art is art. Television has elevated itself, in certain ways, but it's always pushed people's consciousness.

I want to entertain people. That's my whole life. To my last breath.

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

Even the prettiest performers and even the most handsome performers, when they get that opportunity, they still need to step up to the plate and deliver.

I think the arts should get big support, but my country has a lot of needs more important than film. Medication, education, food... The poverty is overwhelming. There are simply more important things to be attended to.