Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not.

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

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Send anyone claiming that their RPG activity is an art form my way, and I'll gladly stick a pin in their head and deflate it just to have the satisfaction of the popping sound that makes. One might play a game artfully, but that makes neither the game nor its play art.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

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.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

I don't see art as entertainment.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.