Max Ernst Quotes

It's clever, but is it Art?

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

There is no best anything in art.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

The most important thing in art is taste.

Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.

The mathematician who after seeing Phedre asked: 'Qu'est que ca prouve?' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.

Appreciation, whether of nature, or books, or art, or men, depends very much on temperament. What is beauty or genius or greatness to one, is far from being so to another.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there's always a question of taste.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Art matters.

The fact is that even art is subject to fashion.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.