Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

For me becoming a painter was an Everest, in terms of what I thought a painter was. There are many roads to becoming an artist. For me it wasn't art school. I didn't have that go to art school and then get a gallery. It's more like, how deep is your inner library to cull from. It's certainly not about technical prowess, just about depth of investigation. It takes time. I had 15 years of painting under my belt before my first New York show. I was glad to have that. It's a good thing to spend your twenties getting your craft.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

Greed stains our culture, soaks our sensibilities and has replaced grace as a sign of our intimacy with the divine.

I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

About 1883 something like a break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of 'impressionism,' and I had come to realize that I did not know how to paint or draw.

All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.

The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.

In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite.

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

A bad forgery's the ultimate insult.

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.