Quotes & Sayings About The Function Of Art

ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough - see point one. — Douglas Adams

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts. — Mary McCarthy

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. — Michael Richardson

Every piece of art is a mirror and serves the function of reflectivity to expose to you and reveal to you more of who you are. — Darryl Anka

Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the artshave broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art. — Jane Heap

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art
novels, poems, plays, paintings or films
can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. — Alain De Botton

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive. — W. H. Auden

The function of art is to free the spirit of man and to invigorate and enlarge his vision. — Katherine Sophie Dreier

The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible. — Jean Dubuffet

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. — John Dewey

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers. — Stephanie Perkins

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul. — Derek Walcott

I admire Ai Weiwei for his art and his activism. His art is beautiful in form, and in function embodies the principles of populism and social consciousness I aspire to in my own practice. — Shepard Fairey

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. — Ayn Rand

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political. — Pierre Bourdieu

Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. — Okakura Kakuzo

Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. — Iannis Xenakis

The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. — Roman Jakobson

The most notable function of Japanese art is to express the melancholy of mortality and the inevitable decay of beauty, to act as the catalyst for the experience of extreme sorrow. The mindfulness is found in every aspect of Japanese culture, in pottery, pop songs, haiku, and even in the way of tea. When it comes to achieving that desired quality of existential desolation in Japanese garden, it's moss that gets the job done. — Vivian Swift

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night. — Howard Brenton

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get. — Edward Albee

The most important function of art and science is to
Awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive. — Albert Einstein

Today, because photography exercises such a profound influence upon the study of art, we tend to disregard the way in which prints continue to function as information. — Edward Lucie-Smith

It is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art. — J. W. N. Sullivan

I think there should be a reworking of the value structure of art. The value is when the artist makes a first engagement with society. That work has the most value. That is the function of the artist. That result. — Lawrence Weiner

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it's to imagine what is possible. — Bell Hooks

The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about - and lots of it! — David Bayles

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them. — Susan Neiman

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object. — Joseph Campbell

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time. — Tacita Dean

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it. — Albert Einstein

No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What's more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools.
Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only "tools" we truly possess in life. — H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way Of Dynamic Meditation

Dickens defends what he has written in terms of its truth. This is not the last time that the 'true' and the 'real' were to be opposed unfruitfully. The same terminological mismatch was to feature throughout the rest of the century in debate about the nature of literary realism and the moral function of realist art. — Charles Dickens

In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? ... No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique. — Niklas Luhmann

A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it,
prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is ... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed! — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art. — Joseph Campbell

Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident. — Rudolf Arnheim

An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred. — Peter London

( ... ) contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. ( ... ) For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existencial channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests — Sarah Thornton

[Medieval] Art was not just a static element in society, or even one which interacted with the various social groups. It was not simply something which was made to decorate or to instruct - or even to overawe and dominate. Rather, it was that and more. It was potentially controversial in ways both similar and dissimilar to its couterpart today. It was something which could by its force of attraction not only form the basis for the economy of a particular way of life, it could also come to change that way of life in ways counter to the original intent. Along with this and because of this, art carried a host of implications, both social and moral, which had to be justified. Indeed, it is from the two related and basic elements of justification and function - claim and reality - that Bernard approaches the question of art in the Apologia. — Conrad Rudolph

The word "art" is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community ... Art is to decorate people's houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it's supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it ... It's supposed to be as essential as a grocery store ... that's the only way art can function naturally. — Amiri Baraka

This world is of a single piece; yet, we invent nets to trap it for our inspection. Then we mistake our nets for the reality of the piece. In these nets we catch the fishes of the intellect but the sea of wholeness forever eludes our grasp. So, we forget our original intent and then mistake the nets for the sea.

Three of these nets we have named Nature, Mathematics, and Art. We conclude they are different because we call them by different names. Thus, they are apt to remain forever separated with nothing bonding them together. It is not the nets that are at fault but rather our misunderstanding of their function as nets. They do catch the fishes but never the sea, and it is the sea that we ultimately desire. — Martha Boles

I've just always been that kid that was like, "Look at me! Look at me!," and doing performances and skits. I'm also, as most artists are, a very sensitive person, so I need that outlet to release that. Art needs to be in my life, otherwise I can't function as a human being. I heard Madonna say, "Live it, breathe it, eat it." That's how I am with the artistic part of myself. — Tinsel Korey

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating ...
I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration ...
I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range ... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life. — Jean Dubuffet

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment. — Beverly Sills

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such. — Ron Silliman

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved. — Herbert Read

At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze. — Jennifer Birkett

Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage. — Frank Zappa

We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move. — Mark Rothko

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it's difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren't more intensely conscious than you've ever been in your life. — Peter Watts

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature ... the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God. — H.L. Mencken

An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography. — Anonymous

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. — Anais Nin

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better. — Gertrude Stein

Ideals are very often formed in the effort to escape from the hard task of dealing with facts, which is the function of science and art. There is no process by which to reach an ideal. There are no tests by which to verify it. It is therefore impossible to frame a proposition about an ideal which can be proved or disproved. It follows that the use of ideals is to be strictly limited to proper cases, and that the attempt to use ideals in social discussion does not deserve serious consideration. — William Graham Sumner

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible. — Constantin Brancusi

The main function of the museum has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts — Albert C. Barnes

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

The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions. — Lawren Harris

Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it. — Stephen Fry

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. — D.H. Lawrence

Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of elements of two (or more) systems of interpretation. This conflict has the function of breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning. — Yuri Lotman

A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development
the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn
it's not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i. e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. — David Foster Wallace

I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce some kind of a sensible pleasure or, at best, to stir up the emotions to a transitory thrill. I had always understood that art was contemplation, and that it involved the action of the highest faculties of man. — Thomas Merton

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. — G.H. Hardy

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was. — Stanley Kubrick

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living. — Jeanette Winterson

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? — Charles Baudelaire

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities. — Gertrude Atherton

IN THE CINEMA A DIRECTOR EXPRESSES HIS INDIVIDUALITY FIRST AND FOREMOST THROUGH HIS SENSE OF TIME, THROUGH RHYTHM. RHYTHM GIVES COLOUR TO A WORK BY DISTINGUISHABLE STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS. RHYTHM MUST ARISE NATURALLY IN A FILM, A FUNCTION OF THE DIRECTOR'S INNATE SENSE OF LIFE AND COMMENSURATE WITH HIS QUEST FOR TIME. — Andrei Tarkovsky

So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.' — Simon McBurney

It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life. — Joseph Campbell

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. — Aristotle.

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds. — Herbert M. Shelton

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. — Art Spiegelman

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula. — Aristotle.

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. — Toni Morrison

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent. — Roman Jakobson

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

The ultimate function of art is to make men do what they want to do, as it is to make them recognize what they know. — Maurice Blondel

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before. — Susanne Katherina Langer

I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author. — Laura Mullen

Some of my colleagues who are criticized today for lack of forthright principles-or who are looked upon with scorn as compromising "politicians"-are simply engaged in the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function. — John F. Kennedy

Means of succeeding in the object we set before us. We must make as it were a fresh start, and before going further define what rhetoric is. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; — Aristotle.

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences. — John Cage

Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake. — Antony Gormley

Katie Prudent: One of the greatest things about those times was that everything he [George Morris] taught us in the equitation had form with meaningful function. Your straight back was for strength, and your heels were your anchor. Everything he taught us made so much sense and that knowledge translated from equitation to the jumpers. — George H. Morris

The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. — Joseph Campbell

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. — Asti Hustvedt

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The function of art is to struggle against obligation. — Amedeo Modigliani

Manipulating emotions is the most important function of meaningful art. — Ryan Quinn

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.
This quote is taken from "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. — Mark Rothko

The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures. — Georges Braque

My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures. — Gerhard Richter

No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'. — Rosalind E. Krauss

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies. — Heinrich Heine

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. — E. M. Forster

Astronomers ... have a common ground for discussion with musicians in the harmony of the stars and musical concords in tetrads and triads of the fourth and the fifth, and with geometricians in the subject of vision; and in all other sciences many points, perhaps all, are common so far as the discussion of them is concerned. But the actual undertaking of works which are brought to perfection by the hand and its manipulation is the function of those who have been specially trained to deal with a single art. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio