Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

The paintings have only ever been ways of exploring architecture. I don't see them as art.

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

...it was the arts, those noble expressions of the human spirit that are communicated through literature, dance, song, film, drama, painting and sculpture, among the many other such creative means, that helped articulate the sufferings of [these] people that were heard around the globe.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end?

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 am all for art's finding a large audience. But the way that's happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It's watering things down.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

Painting is more important than art.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It's better that way.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

We by art unteach what Nature taught.

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.