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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. (Theodor W. Adorno)
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! (Charles Baudelaire)
-on Salvador Dali...
He sought out the shocking: if spitting upon his dead mother's image would attract attention, he was a prolific and boastful spitter. (Sister Wendy Beckett)
I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency. (Ingmar Bergman)
Too many artists in all genres think the more smash, noise, shock they put into something, the more emotion they can evoke in the viewer, reader, listener. Too much emphasis on this can result in sensory overload, deadening the senses rather than exciting them. (Carole Ann Borges)
- oral history interview with Henri Ghent, 1968...
Every once in a while I have to give myself a little vitamin pill and re-understand the reasons why this is disturbing other people. But I think I have come to grips with it and actually have to. Because if not, I can't paint anymore. (Vivian E. Browne)
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked. (Robert Browning)
-Camilla bk. 3 ch.11 (1796)
A little alarm now and then keeps life from stagnation. (Fanny Burney)
However awful the source of an artist's inspiration, what explains or illuminates this source may ultimately transcend it. (Brett Busang)
Shock is still fun. I won't ever shut the door on it. (Nicolas Cage)
I'm just drawing it now. It's totally revolting. I'm sure you'll love it. (Eddie Campbell)
I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension. (Marc Chagall)
Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. (Leonard Cohen)
I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. (Salvador Dali)
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. (Charles Anderson Dana)
Newspapers like work that literally or metaphorically takes the piss, and what could a paper say about my work that is adequately shocking? (Anne Desmet)
People are becoming increasingly bored with being shocked; in fact most of us are now shock-proof. (Jeane Duffey)
Aggressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable. (Brian Eno)
'I feel there is an angel in me,' she'd say,
'whom I am constantly shocking.' (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
Cue the outrage... Some of the outraged should consider spending less time incensed and more time proofreading. (Bridget Foley)
When you are 'bad' in the art world they are very very scared! They want to control you... and they can't! Individuality and uniqueness are threats to the status quo. It is an artist's job to be an 'outlaw.' (Laurence Gartel)
Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised. (Paul Gauguin)
I'm still astounded by some people's reaction to things I consider quite normal. (Jean Paul Gaultier)
The shock of the way I mix patterns and fabrics can be disconcerting, but what I am trying to do is provoke new ideas about how pieces can be put together in different ways. I think this is a more modern way to wear clothes that in themselves are fairly classic. (Jean Paul Gaultier)
To me, it's not strange. Everything else is strange. (Frank Gehry)
Perhaps we might, within the anatomy of our imaginations, think once more of the naked body as a vessel of grace, taste and wonder. In the spotted history of art, stranger things have happened. (Robert Genn)
- Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where...
'bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.' (Edward Gibbon)
-The Wind in the Willows, 1908...
What is the meaning of this gross outrage? (Kenneth Grahame)
-Avant Garde Attitudes...
It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling - or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste. (Clement Greenberg)
The ring, the call, the surprise, the shock that you have out-of-doors – be always looking for the unexpected in nature, do not settle to a formula. (Charles Hawthorne)
A strong work of art really leaves people speechless. They feel a little angry because they don't understand it. (Michael Heizer)
No doubt, in complete abstraction one has a feeling of a great shock, if not an explosion, and in approaching the real, one feels health and truth restored... (Jean Helion)
The current fad in art, is to shock people or appear 'different'... My goal is to help people find the rays of sunshine in an often dark world. (Gary Holland)
I don't mind the painting being disturbing at all. I think that's a compliment. (Dorothy Hood)
Why do art schools and artists pander to our prurient interests in the name of art? This is not art! This is exactly what it looks like: pornography, violence, defamiliarization and deconstructionism put out there for shock value, and nothing more. (Bee Hylinski)
Shock is not an enduring emotion. (Cassandra James)
-on Spencer Tunick's photographs of massed voluntary nudes...
The reason an artist can still make such an impact with such an old idea as the shock or the liberation of nudity is that, so long as we don't all walk about naked in public, the exposure of flesh in a public place will still thrill, excite, disturb. (Jonathan Jones)
-b.1849 d.1926...
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. (Ellen Key)
We need to use the good old pigments, not body parts, to say something. Generally, if we have something to say we find a way. Franz Marc is more expressive in color than for the shock value of cut-out cow organs. (Nader Khaghani)
We sometimes encounter in the best contemporary art the shock of non-recognition, an uncomfortable and unexpected interference in the normally seamless flow of information that our social environment constantly supplies us with. (Walter Klepac)
For the art-historically informed, no art has truly shocked since November 19, 1971, when Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm by a friend, at F-Space in Santa Ana, California. Sliced cows and surgically altering one's own face is aftershock art. (Mark Kostabi)
An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long. (Robert Longo)
I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do. (Sally Mann)
Dada's attempt to shock the bourgeoisie has become neutralized by our forwardness; only school parties still manage to respond with a titter these days. (Lee Marshall)
Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox. (Yann Martel)
From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait. (Henri Matisse)
The adjuration to be 'normal' seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. (Dr. Karl Menninger)
I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock which I feel and which makes me escape from reality... I need a point of departure, even if it's only a speck of dust or a flash of light. (Joan Miro)
If you approach art with the intention of creating shock value, then you limit yourself and your audience, and will be put in the unenviable position of trying to top yourself with each succeeding effort. However, if you allow the process of creation to unfold in a more subjective manner, let the subconscious guide the pathway, and by chance shocking images present themselves, then you are released from the responsibility of intent. You no longer need the burden of expression to outdo yourself in a shocking manner - and it is of no purpose to focus merely on shock value for its own sake. Let the images give rise to their own intentions. (Richard Misiano-Genovese)
-Faces
It's just that my mind wandered and my hands followed, and this was the result. (Holly Monacelli)
I love to do the things the censors won't pass. (Marilyn Monroe)
I like people who shake other people up and make them feel uncomfortable. (Jim Morrison)
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! (LeRoy Neiman)
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong. (John James Osborne)
It is absurd that 'shock' should be unshocking, but that is becoming the reality of the museum visiting experience. The shock has become boring. (Michael Pearce)
- A Glass Eye at a Keyhole, 1938...
Many people who imagine they are live wires are only shocking. (Mary Pettibone Poole)
Even if unmade beds and collages of entrails are classified as art by certain circles these days, in retrospect it will be skill, imagination and originality beyond the banal and shocking that survive. (Faith Puleston)
Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us. (Anne Rice)
Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... (Harold Rosenberg)
Shock art does get a conversation going but ultimately you will find it hanging on very few living room walls... the question is, will it stand the test of time? (Carolyn Rotter)
Imaginary evils soon become real by indulging our reflections on them. (John Ruskin)
Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so. (Jerry Saltz)
There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted. (Carl Sandburg)
Good drama must be drastic. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
-Small is beautiful, 1973
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ''uneconomic'' you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper. (Ernst F. Schumacher)
I draw to shock myself out of a too-easy rhythm – I may begin with no conception whatever, an image emerges (almost always an image that I am obsessed with). I rub it out and begin again, searching for its counterpart. When it appears I invariably find that the thing I draw is at my elbow, it is out of the window, or has been standing at my front door for a long time. (William Scott)
Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated. (Roger Scruton)
The shock, even disgust, provoked by the work is part of its appeal. (Nicholas Serota)
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. (George Bernard Shaw)
I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I perform, I want them to be in pieces. (Nina Simone)
Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people. (Red Skelton)
If a work of art or a new style disturbs you, then it is probably good work. If you hate it, it is probably great. (Leo Steinberg)
Reminding people what in reality it is all about, giving them a theme on which to ponder, creating a shock within them, pulling them out of the delusion of non authenticity, enabling them to become aware of their true possibilities. (Antoni Tapies)
I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later. (Ai Weiwei)
If you are not extreme, then people will take shortcuts because they don't fear you. (Marco Pierre White)
Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia. (Brett Whiteley)
Growth in life is growth in the perception of unsuspected connections, which often shock common sense. Such shocks are expressed in ironies. He who can connect ironically is a mature man. (Kuang-Ming Wu)
Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public. (Ben Yagoda)
Be as delicate as possible. If communication accomplishes something on the gross but damages something on the level of feeling then it is a spiritual loss! The feeling is more important for life. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
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