Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

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

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

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

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.

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

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

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 am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

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.

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

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

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.

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

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

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.

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

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

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

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.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.