Camille Paglia Quotes

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Whether it be in comics, games or film, you can trace the art direction and influences back to some earlier, real-life historic period or artistic movement.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

No art goes unmediated by other art.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

As Christians, we must see that just because an artist-even a great artist-portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.