Thomas Hoving Quotes

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

Not all art is great; most of it's rubbish.

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

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

Now, there are so many movies, so many festivals, and so many awards going on, each judged with each other, like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.

My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art.

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.

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

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

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

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.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

I don't put a great deal of stock in art trophies.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

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?

If it's good art, it's good.

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.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.