Robert C. Solomon Quotes

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

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

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

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.

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

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

There's a point where art is not subjective, and my example for that is Picasso. If you don't like Picasso, that's your problem.

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.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

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.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

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.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

I really think there's no difference between an art piece made by a man and one made by a woman. Is it a good art piece or a bad art piece? Of course, if you're female, you're maybe dealing with different issues.

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

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.

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

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.