Edward Albee Quotes About Art
-
If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre].
→ -
The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.
→ -
All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.
→ -
Art has an obligation to offend
→ -
If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don't think it can be argued.
→ -
I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
→ -
The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.
→ -
I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.
→ -
Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
→ -
Art should never try to be popular.
→ -
School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians
→ -
The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.
→ -
You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention.
→ -
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
→ -
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.
→ -
In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.
→ -
The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?
→
Related Authors
-
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Arthur Miller Playwright -
William Shakespeare Poet -
Carson McCullers Film writer -
Tracy Letts Playwright -
Henrik Ibsen Playwright -
David Mamet Playwright -
Andy Warhol Artist -
Tom Stoppard Playwright -
Tennessee Williams Playwright -
Ernest Lehman Screenwriter -
Glenn Close Film actress -
Neil Simon Playwright -
Samuel Beckett Novelist -
Mike Nichols Film director -
Richard Burton Actor -
Eugene Ionesco Playwright -
Harold Pinter Playwright -
Eugene O'Neill Playwright -
August Wilson Playwright