Art is the defination of your imagination,it documents what is around you.
There are several ways to define art: Creative writing is art, Look at the desk or table where you are,someone made it,therefore It is considered art,it is a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination. .Composing and singing songs is art,poetry is art, On the other hand, art is such a large part of our everyday lives that we may hardly even stop to think about it.
Does art have to be beautiful? Expressive? Original? Uplifting? Intellectual? Older artists and philosophers gave their views on what they think is art.The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.
R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943), English philosopher, The Principles of Art (1938)
Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary.
– Paul Gauguin, (1848–1903), Peruvian-born French artist, quoted in Huneker, The Pathos of Distance (1913)
…creating beauty or harmony
Filling a space in a beautiful way. That's what art means to me.
– Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), American painter, in Art News December 1977
Art is harmony.
– Georges Seurat (1859–1891), French painter, letter to Maurice Beaubourg (1890)
…something that reveals the essential or hidden truth
To me the thing that art does for life is to clean it – to strip it to form.
– Robert Frost (1874–1963), American poet, in Fire and Ice: The Art and Thoughts of Robert Frost, by Lawrence Thompson (1942)
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
– Paul Klee (1879–1940), Swiss painter, The Inward Vision (1959)
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Spanish painter living in France, quoted in Dore Ashton's Picasso on Art (1972)
…thought expressed through form (or not)
To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this—and only this—is to be an artist.
I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.
– Ai Weiwei (1957-), Chinese artist, “Shame on Me,” in Der Spiegel, November 21, 2011.
…self-expression or autobiography
What is art? Art grows out of grief and joy, but mainly grief. It is born of people’s lives.
– Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Norwegian artist, in Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art, by Ragna Stang (1977)
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
– Federico Fellini (1920–1993), Italian film director, in Atlantic Monthly, December 1965
Airing one's dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece.
– François Truffaut (1932–1984), French film director, Bed and Board (1972)
communication of feelings
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and…then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling—this is the activity of art.
– Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), French painter, in Jacques-Louis David, by Anita Brooker (1980)
[In order to distinguish Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from actual Brillo boxes, art can be defined as] embodied meaning.
– Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013), American philosopher of art, What Art Is (2013)
Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.
Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), American artist, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Art and Its Significance, edited by Stephen David Ross (1994)
…a source of calm in a chaotic world
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
– Henri Matisse (1869–1954), French artist, Notes of a Painter (1908)
Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
– Saul Bellow (1915–2005), American novelist, in George Plimpton, Writers at Work, third series (1967)
Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché, The Blind Man, 2nd issue (May 1917)
If one general statement can be made about the art of our times, it is that one by one the old criteria of what a work of art ought to be have been discarded in favor of a dynamic approach in which everything is possible
– Peter Selz (1919- ) German-born American art historian, Art in Our Times (1981)
