Jean-Michel Basquiat Quotes

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.

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

An artist is usually responsible only for the creation of a particular art. It's up to the critics to label it.

Wit has as few true judges as painting.

I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

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

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

What is needed in the theater, in fact for all our art forms, is a vibrant critical tradition.

Twombly, frankly, was an acquired taste. I was not in love with Twombly the first time I saw one of his paintings.

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

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

I can tell really early on in a painting if I'm going to toss it or not.

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

People like abstract art because it makes them feel clever.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.