What is the art? This is the question! Below are a few ideas.
Here's the technical definition as taken from The American College Dictionary (Random House; 1970):
Art: (n.) 1. The production or expression of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. 2. Journ any illustration in a newspaper or magazine. 3. a department of skilled performance: industrial art. 4. (pl.) a branch of learning or university study. 5. (pl.) liberal arts 6. skilled workmanship, execution, or agency (often opposed to nature). 7: craft; cunning: glib and oily art. 8. Studied action; artificiality in behavior 9. (usually pl.) an artifice or artful device. 10. archaic. learning or science.
My idea of Art is that it is an expression of what is inside each person who produces it. Sometimes it represents an idea or a feeling. Sometimes it represents something from the "collective consciousness". When it represents the latter we all have a tendency to recognize it, and feel it. Art is something we feel, no matter what form it takes, music, poetry, paintings... we feel it!
"Art is long and time is fleeting." -Longfellow, A Psalm of Life
"Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.’’ - Pablo Picasso
‘‘The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything by his art.’’ - George Bernard Shaw
"What is art? Nature concentrated. -Balzac (1700-1850)
"For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss." -Dryden (1631-1700)
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. -Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)
"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection." -Michelangelo (1474-1564)
"Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect." -Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)
"The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form." -Francois Delsarte (1811-1871)
"All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage." -Walter Pater (1839-1894)
"Art is not a thing; it is a way." -Elbert Hubbard (1859 -1915)
"A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament." -Emile Zola (1840-1902)
"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible." -Paul Klee (1879-1940)
"Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men." -Schiller (1759-1805)
"Art is more godlike than science. Science discovers; art creates." -John Opie (1761-1807)
"Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." -Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
"Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so art color life." -Lubbock (1834-1913)
"Art comes to you posing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass." -Walter Pater (1839- 1894)
"Art is the great stimulus to life." -Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization." -Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936)
"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. " -G. B. Shaw (1856-1950)
"The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature reproduced in art." -Longfellow (1819-1892)
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