Lila Acheson Wallace Quotes

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I feel that all good art is powerful and simple.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

Art is the ultimate luxury good, but one that can make you think, give a you a blast of beauty and enhance your life. Even if the work's made of plasticine.

You've just got to believe that people will see and appreciate the value in the music and the artistry that we bring when they hear it.

If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games are good for us but whether they are good, full stop.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

A musician has to find a way to make his music mean something special - spiritually or however you can.

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

I've never seen bad drawing destroy a good idea. On the other hand, I've never seen a good drawing save a bad idea.

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

A painting doesn't have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people's needs.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.

There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.

People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.