Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes about Art

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.

We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.

If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?