Quotes on Art..purpose ?

To a colourless world, art brings an element of colour. To lives without meaning it gives a ray of hope. Art in all its forms makes us lift up our eyes, if only for a fleeting moment, above the dreary everyday existence, and makes us feel that there is something more to life than this, that we can be better than we are, that the relations between people can be human, that the world could be a better place than it is. Art is thus the collective dream of humanity, the expression of a deep-seated feeling that our lives are not what they ought to be, and a passionate if unconscious striving for something different.

Marxism and art

An Introduction to Trotsky's Writings on Art,

by Alan Woods

http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/marxism_and_art.html

1908 Trotsky wrote the following prophetic lines: "You see, visiting art exhibitions is a terrible act of violence that we perpetrate on ourselves. This way of experiencing artistic pleasure expresses a terrible barracks-capitalist barbarism [...] Let's take a landscape, for example. What is it? A piece of nature, arbitrarily amputated, that has been framed and hung on a wall. Between these elements, nature, the canvas, the frame and the wall, a purely mechanical relation exists: the picture cannot be infinite, for tradition and practical considerations have condemned it to be square. So that it should not crease or buckle, it is framed, and so that it should not lie on the floor, people hammer a nail in a wall, fix a cord onto it, and hang up the picture by this cord. Then, when all the walls are covered in pictures, sometimes arranged in two or three rows, people call this an art gallery or exhibition. And then we are forced to swallow all this in one gulp: landscapes, genre scenes, frames, cord and nails...

"But what I want painting to renounce is its absolutism and re-establish its organic link with architecture and sculpture, from which it has long been detached. This separation did not happen by accident, oh no! From that time, painting has undertaken a very long and instructive journey. It has conquered landscape, has become inwardly mobile and intimate, and has developed an astounding technique. But now, enriched with all thee gifts, it must go back to its mother's bosom, architecture... I want paintings to be connected not by cords but by their artistic significance to walls or to a cupola, to the purpose of a building, to the character of a room...and not hanging like a hat on a hat stand. Picture galleries, those concentration camps for colours and beauty, serve but as a monstrous appendage to our colourless and unsightly daily reality." (Culture and Revolution in the Thought of Leon Trotsky, p. 67-8.)