Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.
Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist-hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.
The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured form the adjacent cities; a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements; and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch.
I definitely believe that the power of the artist is in the artist's hands now. We're kind of in the wild, wild west of music where labels don't exist anymore. And you go as far as you take yourself. And that's that American self-determination that is one of the reasons this country is so great and can survive on autopilot right now.
Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.
Im interested in the liberating aspect of being totally untethered, let loose in the worst possible environments. My favorite artists are always women that do things that are so wrong... I like things to be seven kinds of wrong. If they are seven kinds of wrong, sometimes the wrongs neutralize themselves, and the whole thing becomes.
First of all, as a professional, you can run around saying "artists, schmartists" as much as you want. But I'm a professional, so if somebody hires me for something, I'm going to bring my best to it. They've hired me, I'm professional, I show up on time, I do my job. That's what we're doing. So in that sense, it's always both things.
I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.
Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.
I do support artists standing by their beliefs, and walking with integrity. We have to find a better way to commercially exploit music, while giving artists their proper respect. This cannot be done while taking their contributions for granted, or trying to control the scope of their growth and power through threats and fear tactics.
The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.
How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.
I want to figure out what kind of artist I want to be, because with the 'American Idol' process, it just works really fast. The night of the finale, they said, 'OK, here are all the label people that you're gonna work with, this is the album you're gonna make and blah, blah, blah.' So it was a pretty fast process, but it's been cool.
Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening.
Here's the thing, trust changes everything. Once you know what an artist can do, and you know their commitment level, it opens up the playbook hugely. I have worked with artists I really love, but they may have some small aspect that they hate drawing, or that they don't excel at, and that effectively takes that option off the table.
When I graduated from college, I went straight to work for a federal contractor, a desk job, and they were great to me, they loved me, I was like their mascot, but I just couldn't stand working in an office. I just hated it. And so one day I went in and said, 'I'm sorry, this is my two-weeks notice, I'm quitting to become an artist.'
Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.
Obviously I've always loved singing and performing, but I fell in love with songwriting and then I enjoyed doing that for other people and getting coached. But then I kind of stumbled into the right group of people that really started to create some unique music for me and what I wanted to say, so then it made me want to be an artist.
Being an artist and having a following can be a very scary thing because idolization makes you question your inner role in the universe. A lot of people get caught up in this idea of, "Wow! This world does revolve around me," and it most certainly does not. It's the exact opposite; these people don't exist for you, you exist for them.
I think I can see people wanting to hear more music-music now as opposed to all hip-hop. You know, which I have nothing against hip-hop. I think some of it is really good. But on the other hand, some of the real great artists are just being lost because they're not getting the airplay or anything to make them inspired to record again.
We've been fortunate enough to have a lot of people to ask us to be on their records - so many artists and musicians that we really respect and look up to. And it's been really special. But from our side, there's so much that we in the Little Dragon are still learning about ourselves writing-wise that I guess we haven't had that need.
I think that for the five-year-old watching MTV right now, Lady Gaga is going to be an iconic person. In 20 years, the people who are here and talking to journalists will be like, 'Oh Lady Gaga changed my life, Nicki Minaj changed my life.' They'll be saying who influenced them and it will be Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, artists like that.
I don't know if there is an existing model that anyone can hold on to right now. Every [piece of] advice about how to go about in the record business you would get 5 years ago is no longer valid. Everything is changing very rapidly and there is an increased sense of anger and despair among artists that are not major-selling megastars.
Artists, writers and people in creative fields are entrepreneurs by necessity. Nobody gives them a paycheck or picks up their medical insurance. The ones who succeed learn to think and act like 'independent operators.' I think people who are technically 'employees' have to think this way as well. The company is not looking out for you.
Mystical groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians turned tarot into an American fad during the early 1900s. Many American tarot practitioners use a set of cards known as the Waite-Smith deck, created in 1909 by A.E. Waite, a British member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith.
Since the traditional recorded-music business models have drastically changed, there is truly diminished income derived from recorded music by artists - both current and catalog. The touring industry has become much more important as a majority revenue stream and the ancillary fan experiences and promotions that may be derived from it.
The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true. As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist's vision.
As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived.
I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic; there's been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn't make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.
He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.
There are a lot of doors that still get shut, and there are a lot of walls to still breach. But, the stuff that does come across to me, or that I hear about or read about, that I'm willing to go out there and fight for, I still have to go audition. I do have a certain leeway to choose, from that group, what I want to say, as an artist.
I never wanted to be that fad type of artist. When I looked up to artists, watching TV, I wanted to see somebody. I wanted to touch that person. I wanted to sound like them. I wanted to move like them. That' s what I want my fans to do. So that's why, everything that I do, the music I make, how I dress, it's all based off my lifestyle.
It's understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions - they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It's an intuitive process, and that's what they do well when they're successful. They don't understand technology.
As rich as you think some of us are, for every $18.99 CD you buy, the artist usually sees a toonie or so. Pay your producer out of that. Then your manager. Then split it five ways among your band mates. Now don't act surprised when you see the drummer of a platinum-selling Canadian rock band behind the drive- thru window at Tim Hortons
Im happy to say that at 62, I think Ive reached that point where stuff doesnt bother me as much, and my gratitude level has gone way up, especially having gone through the loss that Ive had, and losing so many of the great artists that I was close to. They taught me how to see it with a grain of salt and a lot of humor and perspective.
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
It wasn't just like, "I want to make a record that sounds like classic rock" at all. It was more like, "I want to make a record that is a little more unsettling and maybe isn't as easily understood now." That just seemed more important, like, for me to make as an artist, than it was to make something to make people feel safe right away.
I feel that puttin' in the hours and years in the studio, honing my craft, definitely played a part, me consciously networking and presenting myself as an artist that's commercially sellable led to me meeting the right people, which in turn led to them givin' me positive referrals to other people, which in turn led to me signin' a deal.
I did The Fifth Element and [Jean-Claude] Mezieres, the artist of Valerian; he was working on Fifth Element. And he's actually the one who say, why don't you do Valerian? And I said because we can't make it. And you really have to wait for Avatar and to suddenly think oh okay, maybe we can think of it. But before Avatar, just forget it.
The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered.
I think 'Interscope' always puts the artist first, and they're focusing on these artists' development. I felt like that was a part of my career that I kind of needed to focus on after having come from the radio and getting exposure that way. I wanted to grow my brand and grow my fanbase, and they have proven to be the best fit for that.
I think everyone has a story to tell. Part of what I do is help artists find their voice, not only their vocal voice, but their writing voice. Every artist that I worked with who has those records that everyone talks about, they are also writers. I like to say I helped support whatever their writing was so people heard the song clearly.
I once won a Grammy for an Australian version of 'Turn the Page' that another artist did; I can't remember his name. There've been covers down through the years around the world, but I did like Metallica's, because I kind of related to Metallica when they first came out, because Jimmy Hetfield really reminded me of me in 1965, you know?
Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)
Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.
Six months is the most you can ask of any fan in this day and age, with the Internet and all these new artists. I understand that my music is in a lot of mediums. Some people want me to make an R&B album. Some people want me to never sing again. I just don't want people to be able to draw comparisons between my old songs and my new ones.
As I've picked up more responsibilities in life, I've found nearly every one of those extra burdens drains me in a way that makes writing more difficult. That may not be the case for everyone - I know plenty of writers and artists who seem to have energy in abundance for all the facets of life; but are they producing anything worthwhile?
I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness.
I think the four land artists I showed all worked within a few years of each other. And they were standard bearers, I suppose, for land art. They each did very separate things. Apparently, later in California, a lot of artists started working in that medium and there was something of a rush of earthworks. But I wasn't involved with that.