Some art is cool and distant; this page celebrates the opposite — work that runs hot, human, and full of heartbeat. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu shakes his head at anything too icy or detached, insisting that art should feel alive: “I hate intellectual films. I hate cold art.” Installation artist Christo echoes that fire when he says, “Our work of art is a scream of freedom.” These Art & Artists quotes honor that wild, liberating spark.

The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul. ~ Bruce Springsteen

To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes. ~ Akira Kurosawa, NY Times, 1998

I never know what I’m going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I’m just the middleman. ~ Peter Max, Austin American-Statesman, 3/27/04

Art is man’s nature: Nature is God’s art. ~ Philip James Bailey

Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for. ~ George Sand

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. ~ William Faulkner

Pop art is a way of liking things. ~ Andy Warhol

A work of art comes only from inside a human being. ~ Edvard Munch

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which might be for every mental worker… a good armchair… to rest from physical fatigue. ~ Henri Matisse, 1908

An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look “abstract” any longer. ~ Marcel Duchamp

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself. ~ Uta Hagen

Collage is an inherently literary medium. It’s associative, and collagists use images and objects to produce meaning through context. ~ Pavel Zoubok

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary. ~ Theodor Adorno