Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes.
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.
Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
The arts are what makes life worth living. You've got food, you've got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect - make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren't extras.