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It is art, if you can`t do it, if you can, it is not art. JOHANN NESTROY
Art is not a mirror which reflects reality, but a hammer with which you shape it.
KARL MARX
If disreputable girls dance with bare legs, it is good for nothing, but some people like looking at them - therefore it is art.
LEW NIKOLAJEWITSCH TOLSTOI
Art is to a great extent a male function
EMIL NOLDE
Art is what you cannot grasp.
MARKUS LÜPERTZ
Urgent appeal to speakers at a vernissage, writers of catalogues, prologues and epilogues, art writers, feuilletonists, art editors, speakers on panels, round-table experts, small-talkers, party-goers, cultural politicians, art teachers, a-level pupils,breakfast directors! Beware of exploitation of paperbacks, wherequotations named above are registered. Only moderately ornated samples of your printed matters and speeches with the industriously collected and beautifully arranged literary fruits, picked by Andreas Maeckler, guarantees lasting profit and reputation. For everybody will. no, must buy this - and if it just serves to find out, whether you have breakfasted too lavishly in it.
ART – DAS KUNSTMAGAZIN, No. 9/ September 1987
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ART: HAMMER AND MIRROR
"What is art?" Many people would like to know, but there is no conclusive answer. With the aid of 1o83 quoted answers a DuMont pocket book (232 pages, 16, 8o DM) revolves around the definition problem that lends the book its title. The editor, Andreas Maeckler, considers it to be less solved than ever. Words of poets and thinkers from two and a half thousand years which complement each other, but also contradict each other stridently, offer an informative and entertaining read. We learn that art is the "ideal of craftmanship" (Lissitzky) but also "magic relieved from the falsehood of being the truth." (Adorno) "communicated pleasure" (Nietzsche). "Harmless and pleasurable" (Freud), "the perfection of nature" (Ovid); " a special form of the proclamation of truth" (higher administrative court Münster), besides "a mirror that `is fast`like a clock" (Kafka) - no, " not a mirror that reflects reality, but a hammer with which you shape it" (Karl Marx). Thus the definitions of art seem sometimes to result in violent disputes. "Art is gratuitous", decrees the French sermonizer Ben Vautier. "For sure!" says the Polish writer of aphorisms, Stanislav Jerzy Lee, " and I even know for whom."
DER SPIEGEL, No. 32/ August 3. 1987
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