Art is....
Art is the mathematical result of the emotional desire for beauty.
Oscar Wilde
Letter to Marie Prescott
April 1883
—The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis
Art is not the translation or the representation or the expression of some hidden thing. It is a thing in itself—pure, absolute, without reference. In whatever medium you choose to employ, the mastery of the medium constitutes the art. There are no rules, no guideposts. But one can detect bad art from good art—or better, one can detect art.
Henry Miller
Letter to Anaïs Nin
10th April 1933
—A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann
Art is not merely painting. True painting, moreover, is full of the soul that wields the brush. Art is not merely criticism and satire: criticism and satire depict only one side of the truth.
George Sand
Letter to Gustave Flaubert
18th December 1875
—The George Sand–Gustave Flaubert Letters, edited by A. Walker
Art is a day by day game of living and dying and if you live a little more than you die you are going to continue to create some pretty fair stuff, but if you die a little more than you live, you know the answer.
Charles Bukowski
Letter to Ann Bauman
20th June 1962
—Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, edited by Seamus Cooney
Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.
Saul Bellow
Letter to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
20th January 1953
—Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor
Art is a particular idiom of human expression whose purpose is to mediate and unfold the grandeur (you know greatness, complexity, aesthetics, etc.) of being.
Carolee Schneemann
Letter to Joseph Berke
13 September 1966
—Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, edited by Kristine Stiles
Art is no mere game of the intellect; it is a special atmosphere that we breathe. But if in search of more and more potent air we descend ever deeper into art’s subterranean recesses, who knows that we may not end by breathing deadly miasmas?
Gustave Flaubert
Letter to Louise Colet
1st October 1852
—The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, edited by Francis Steegmuller
Art is not anything that goes on “among” people, not the art of the novel anyway. It is something that one experiences alone and for the purpose of realizing in a fresh way, through the senses, the mystery of existence.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Eileen Hall
10th March 1956
—The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald
Art is a harmony parallel to nature.
Paul Cézanne
Letter to Joachim Gasquet
26th September 1897
—The Letters of Paul Cézanne, edited by Alex Danchev
Art is a great solvent of bigotries and snobberies.
George Bernard Shaw
Letter to St John Ervine
31st October 1942
—Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, edited by Dan Laurence
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Fascinating array of definitions of art...
I wrote something similar: "To write is to wade, alone, into the vast, murky ocean of thought and idea. It is equal parts treading water and drowning, a haphazard stumbling toward insight and inspiration. It is plumbing into the depths of your soul, groping around to grab hold of something true and real and unique and you. It is casting and reeling, changing the tackle and hoping that the Big One doesn’t just nibble at your hook, but firmly latches on. And that you can successfully reel it in..."
More: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/why-i-write