John McCormack Quotes

Art should be life. It's an imitation of life. It should have some humanity 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.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

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.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

Music is important.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

Music tells no truths.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

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

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

If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

Art is truth.

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.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

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

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.