Thomas Hoving Quotes

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

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.

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

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

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

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

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.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

When art wins, everyone wins.

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

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

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

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.

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.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

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

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

The value of art is in the observer.