Aesthetic Transformation Quotes

There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art.

Wealth makes an ugly person beautiful to look on and an incoherent speech eloquent; and wealth alone can enjoy pleasure even in sickness and can conceal its miseries.

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

All I want to do is make people beautiful.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

Art needs an operation

I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world.

I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don't like it, you can paint over it!

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

Well, the beginning is actually quite easy, because I can still be quite free about the way I handle things - colours, shapes. And so a picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins - changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man. Thanks to number, the cry becomes a song, noise acquires rhythm, the spring is transformed into a dance, force becomes dynamic, and outlines figures.

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

Crumb was such an influence on me. He's such a visionary, such a great artist, that he so shaped my artistic sensibilities on a certain level that I do owe everything to him. The way I see the world is largely changed by him.

As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.

I've definitely grown and evolved as a person, as an artist, you know. Just in terms of my style, my taste, my influences, everything... That's a part of being an artist I think.

I don't watch my own past films: when I watch them, I find they don't work very well, because I have changed. If I continue to make films, in fact, it is because I always want to repair my films. My inner rhythm has changed; I have changed. I have changed my way to film.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

I didn't really start appreciating Picasso until a few years back. I didn't like him at all. But now I can see this world is crazy.