Artistic Imitation Quotes

Life imitates art -- but badly.

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

Good painter imitates nature, bad ones spews it up.

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.

Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they're either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer.

When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.

Always think that in any area of the arts, you get maybe ten percent of people who are creative, original... and the rest are generally following on, copying.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts his pattern. As a result, his action is and , more importantly, his thinking become mechanical. His responses become automatic, according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited.

A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.

If one artist sells five million albums, the tendency is for other artists to say, 'Maybe I should do a little of that, too.' That can be tough to resist.

I thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba.

Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.