Sol LeWitt Quotes

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.

Buying art is not understanding art.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.

Art is not disposable. If you want it, you have to hold it and smell it and touch it and read the credits and enjoy it and put it on your wall.