Anselm Kiefer Quotes

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other 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.

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

Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.

People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

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

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

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

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

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.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

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

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.