It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks…

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.

— John Szarkowski

Content alone is propaganda; form alone is wallpaper.

— Philip Jones Griffiths

“Narratives are universally used for mediating emotional experiences. The purpose of aesthetic objects has been defined, in part, as 'the awakening, intensifying, or maintaining…

— Mikkel Wallentin Arndis Simonsen Andreas Hojlund Nielsen

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and…

— Edward Albee

Just because something causes you to have a feeling of aesthetic beauty does not make it a work of art.

— Fred Ross

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an…

— Susan Sontag

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the…

— Herbert Marcuse

The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means…

— Hans Hofmann

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I…

— George Orwell

[T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

— George Orwell

I want my whole life to be a great work of art, not just my art. And that means paying attention to my entire…

— Jewel

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

— Adolf Loos

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation…

— Karen Armstrong

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles,…

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe