John Ruskin Quotes

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

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

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.

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

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

I believe that true art is universal in its appeal.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

A great painting is a great painting.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.

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

I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them.

I'm a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That's what I look for - a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn't always what we conventionally think of as beauty.

I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there's art in everything as long as it's made with soul.

Music is powerful.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!