Artist Quotes
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Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.
Paul Robeson
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Now culture being a social product, I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function to beautify, to glorify, to dignify man... Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions... The making of a genuine artist or writer is not mysterious. It is not the work of Divine Providence. Social conditions, history, and the people's struggle are the factors behind it.
Carlos Bulosan
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At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.
Catherine Hicks
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You can't steal an artist's songs and also tell him he can't license that music to a commercial.
Jack White
The White Stripes
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It is only after years of struggle and deprivation that the young artist should touch color - and then only in the company of his betters.
El Greco
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All existing art was religious until perhaps a hundred years ago. Within that there's obviously been lots of room for manipulation. I think that's because our current religion is capitalism. Capitalism has the functions of patronage, commissions, control of content, bestowing of space, elevation of certain artists over others based on how much they pander to people in power, the determination of value of the work, all of it. Capitalism commissions artwork now, the market.
Chitra Ganesh
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Every now and then, I feel terribly uncomfortable with what I'm working on, and then I think maybe I am an artist. I'm not very articulate about it, but I do know that you have to follow your gut.
Tom Hollander
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All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it.
Ernst Gombrich
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The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.
George Sand
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Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.
Elaine de Kooning
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I think it's becoming balanced. You have a lot of artists coming from New York and LA. For a while it was just Atlanta. Now I see big artists everywhere, to be honest. The way the Internet is now, people aren't going to care where you're from, as long as you have some sick shit going on.
Nav
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The idea that musicians/artists have a responsibility to be community leaders or "role models" is problematic to me because I really believe that some of the most exciting art is not community-minded at least in any obvious or direct way, which is not to say that it is not ethical or consciousness-changing.
Kathleen Hanna
Bikini Kill
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A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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In her dance, she controlled the bright paper birds with invisible wires and threads. She played the human: heavy, tied to earth. Her dances weren't pretty or delightful, but they were magical, [...] They called her a dancer and a puppeteer and an artist. They might have called her a witch, and not the good kind either.
Katherine Catmull
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No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it's a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever.
Harry Connick, Jr.
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I had to learn, because as an artist myself, an artist owns that right to protect their interest of how they want to roll their project out. It's just important to give them that opportunity to roll it out the way they want to.
Bryce Wilson
