Lou Reed Quotes

The key to good art is to make something that means something to you.

Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?

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

It's clever, but is it 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.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

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?

Unlike fashion, art isn't applied. It doesn't have to serve anybody. It doesn't have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

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.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

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.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.