When art and the praxis of life are one, when the praxis is aesthetic and art is practical, art’s purpose can no longer be discovered, because the existence of two distinct spheres (art and the praxis of life) that is constitutive of the concept of purpose or intended use has come to an end.
Peter Bürger

The problem of the relation between the work of art and life, between the exceptional and the everyday (and the superseding their dissociation, and consequently the problem of the possible fusion between what used to be art separated from everyday life, and everyday life devoid of meaning and beauty) is fundamental one; but as yet its presence is superficial, and not envisaged in practical terms. It remains ill-defined and unresolved.
Henri Lefebvre

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to make one feel, in privation and absence, certain past elements of life that through the mediation of art would escape the confusion of appearances, since appearance is what suffers from the reign of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty inseparable from duration, and tending even to lay claim to eternity. The situationist goal is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleeting moments resolutely arranged. The success of these moments can only be their passing effect. Situationists consider cultural activity, from the standpoint of totality, as an experimental method for constructing daily life, which can be permanently developed with the extension of leisure and the disappearance of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).
Guy Debord

My greatest achievement was using painting, using art, to create a modus vivendi, a way of understanding life; that is, for the time being, of trying to make my life into a work of art itself, instead of spending my life creating works of art in the form of painting or sculptures, I now believe that you can quite readily treat your life, the way you breathe, act, interact with other people, as a picture, a tableau vivant or a film scene, so to speak. These are my conclusions now: I never set out to do this when I was twenty or fifteen, but I realize, after many years, that this was fundamentally what I was aiming to do.
Marcel Duchamp

Down with art as a beautiful patch on the squaid life of the rich.
Down with art as a precious stone in the midst of the dismal and dirty life of the poor.
Down with art as a means of escaping from a life that is not worth living.
Conscious and organized life, that knows how to see and build, is contemporary art.
Alexander Rodchenko

The distinction which the term ‘aesthetic’ initially enforces in the mid-eighteenth century is not one between ‘art’ and ‘life’, but between the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas, that which is bound up with our creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowy existence in the recesses of the mind.
Terry Eagleton

It was capitalism, not Futurism or Surrealism, that successfully integrated life and art in a new phase in which the commodity no longer feared culture because it had already incorporated it, was more aesthetic signifier than humdrum use-value.
Raymond Williams

To Dorian Gray, life itself was the first, the greatest of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
Oscar Wilde

But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awereness of the lives of other people –for style for the writer, no less than color for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision.
Marcel Proust

An art that has life in it does not restore the works of the past: it continues them.
Rodin

There is no great expedition in art which is not undertaken at the risk of one’s life.
Andre Breton

The Modern artist does not paint, but creates directly... Life and art make one.
Tristan Tzara

If art is useless, so was life.
Charles Baudelaire

Imagination is the vehicle of sensitivity! Transported by (effective) imagination we attain life, that very life which is absolute art itself.
Yves Klein