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"For a long time the best critics—Ruskin was one—told the western world that a great nation would produce great art. Art would come forth by a natural reflex from high endeavors and noble institutions. The maxim was really a license to criticize the nation and its institutions. Today, being self-conscious as well as disaffected, artists have come to believe that art can do without a nation, can be produced by aiming directly at art, in contempt of society. When done, the work of art suffices for all time and mankind can be dismissed. No need to ask whether in this conception 'work of art' stands equally for a Hemingway novel and a junk 'sculpture' consisting of the rusty springs of an old armchair. The element of quality should not distract us from the point, which is that the doctrine of art's imperishable value rests on a self-defeating argument: we must produce and support art—at private or public expense—so as to prove ourselves a great people and leave our mark in history. But our art and our artists use art to show that we are of no account whatever and might as well not exist—unless we happen to be artists." Jacques Barzun   "The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians." Thomas Bernhard   "Camus quotes André Gide—'Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.' The sentiment is easy to misunderstand. The constraint Gide refers to does not come from the outside, from government censors or compliant editors. 'Art,' Camus wrote, 'lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself.' Other forms of constraint kill it. However, 'if art does not constrain itself, it indulges in ravings and becomes a slave to mere shadows. The freest art and the most rebellious will therefore be the most classical.' The possibilities of art in turbulent, dangerous times, Camus writes, lies 'in our courage and our will to be lucid.' The more chaotic and threatening the world, the more disordered his material, Camus insists, so greater order is needed in the art—'the stricter will be his rule and the more he will assert his freedom.'" Ian McEwan   "There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine. Therefore, Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period." Mao Zedong   "Art reveals the trace of the artist's hand: Andy resorted to silkscreening. A work of art is a unique object: Andy came up with multiples. A painter paints: Andy made movies. Art is divorced from the commercial and the utilitarian: Andy specialized in Campbell's soup cans and dollar bills. Painting can be defined in contrast to photography: Andy recycled snapshots. A work of art is what an artist signs, proof of his creative choice, his intentions: for a small fee, Andy signed any object whatever. Art is an expression of the artist's personality: Andy sent in his stead a look-alike on the lecture tour." Edmund White   "The much-maligned 'art scene' of the present day is perfectly harmless and even pleasant, if you don't judge it in terms of false expectations. It has nothing to do with those traditional values that we hold high (or that hold us high). It has virtually nothing whatever to do with art. That's why the 'art scene' is neither base, cynical, nor mindless: it is a scene of brief blossoming and busy growth, just one variation on the never-ending round of social game-playing that satisfies our need for communication, alongside such others as sport, fashion, stamp-collecting and cat-breeding. Art takes shape in spite of it all, rarely and always unexpectedly; art is never feasible." Gerhard Richter   "Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. Manet's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet's wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas." Clement Greenberg   "Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key—with many nations there is no other—to the understanding of their wisdom and of their religion." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel   "I think it was Bismarck who believed that governing was an art, and I think, in my case: governing is as much an art as painting pictures or composing string quartets. The object of this political art, the material with which this political art is supposed to work, is society, the state, humanity." Kurt Eisner   "It is the most overweening of the arts, and the one that least lets us alone. A gallery we can't walk out of, a book we can't close, and art we can't even turn our backs on because it is there facing us on the other side of the street as well—little wonder that people should want, if only occasionally, some obliterating revenge. Painters and writers can talk grandly of how they 'live for' their art and of how their art in turn provides a model for us to 'live by.' Architects have no need of such special pleading: theirs is an art we must live in." Blake Morrison   "The bourgeois floods the world with art products of a baseness hitherto unimaginable. Then, reacting against such an evident degradation of the artist's task, art withdraws from the market and becomes non-social, that is personal. It becomes 'highbrow' art, culminating in personal fantasy. The art work ends as a fetish because it was a commodity. Both are equally signs of the decay of bourgeois civilization due to the contradictions in its foundation." Christopher St. John Spring   "It was that overrated sentimentalist Albert Camus who said that 'only artists have never harmed mankind.' The truth is, we do art no honor and no justice when we represent it as invariably humane, heroic and disinterested in its intentions, exclusively good in its effects, and thus not subject to reproach or accountability—sacred. Such compliments deny art the very importance which they appear to claim for it, I am not of course speaking of 'bad art,' that is, works which for one reason or another fail to earn the minimum of respect on the part of those who know. I am speaking of art in the usual honorific sense, and I say that to acknowledge its power entails the obligation to examine how that power is exercised and how our present blind submission to it affects in turn those who exercise it." Jacques Barzun   "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him." Jenny Offill   "I'm objecting to this reductive approach to art in often nakedly ideological fashion over the last, you know, it's really thirty years going on forty years now, ok. The ideological approach to art. I would say that's probably the dominant concept at the elite schools, at the elite universities in the United States, ok, that art is ideological, that art is a tool of ideology. And so the students at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level are encouraged to approach the artwork in terms of what the artwork is doing wrong, ok, or what the artwork is hiding." Camille Paglia   "The lover becomes a squanderer: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes an ass in magnanimity and innocence; he believes in God again, he believes in virtue, because he believes in love; and on the other hand, this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities, and even the door of art is opened to him. If we subtracted all traces of this intestinal fever from lyricism in sound and word, what would be left of lyrical poetry and music? L'art pour l'art perhaps: the virtuoso croaking of shivering frogs, despairing in their swamp. All the rest was created by love." Friedrich Nietzsche   "This century is one of the lowest points in the history of art, even lower than the eighteenth century when there was no great art, just frivolity. Twentieth century art is a mere light pastime, as though we were living in a merry period, despite all the wars we've had as part of the decoration." Marcel Duchamp   "There are lots of things you can't criticise Hirst for. You can't complain about the fact that he doesn't make his work by himself—neither did Rembrandt or Rubens or Warhol. You can't complain that he's made too many similar works—Pissaro, Magritte, Dalí and many others churned out substandard stuff on demand. The real difficulty with coming to a judgement on Hirst is that contemporary art theory does not permit one to assess whether an artist's work is superficial or deep, because it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between a banal work of art and one that takes banality as its theme, or between a simple work of art and a simplistic one. A critic could spend hours trying to decide if something is superficially superficial or deeply superficial—and never come up with an answer." Ben Lewis   "Politics is the art of living together and of being 'just' to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life. The art of peace; the art of accommodating moralities to one another." Michael Oakeshott   "During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they'd say, 'Money is bad,' and 'Working is bad,' but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." Andy Warhol   "There is continuous rivalry in expertise. That is true for most academics—economists and sociologists and professors of literature. But the historian or critic of art is in a special position: the beautiful is a commodity with a market value. A professor of poetry who is underwriting Yeats, say, while his rival is committed to Eliot, does not stand to lose anything material—nor to lose anybody else anything—if Yeats's stock goes down and Eliot's rises; only his infallibility is at stake. But the art critic or art historian utters opinions that are expressible to others in terms of currency. His judgments affect the real market, sending prices up or down." Mary McCarthy