Clive Bell Quotes

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

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

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.