Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

If the standard for art is the decency of its creators, we're going to have a lot of empty museums.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

I used to always say - and I think a lot of artists think of it this way - that when you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration.

It is hard to separate the art from the artist.

'Annie Hall' and 'The Graduate' are incredible films. Why should we be deprived of watching them because some of the men that made them are bad?

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

Is there really any relationship between artists' personal conduct and their art? Certainly not.

Art is subjective and, as an artiste, if our artistic work is not appreciated by the majority, it hurts.

What's right is right, and what's wrong is wrong. That's how I live my life.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter.

Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.