Roxane Gay Quotes

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.

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.

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

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

The ethos of most films is that you make a film, you exploit the community, you exploit the environment, and it's OK because you made a great film, you know?

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

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

A great painting is a great painting.

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.

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.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

It feels dangerous when people say, 'Oh, Sean Baker focuses on marginalised people.' And offensive. As if I'm standing there with my planner thinking, 'OK, where's the next marginalised group I can make a movie about?'

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

Can that which has cost the artist days, weeks, months and even years of reflection be understood in a flash by a dilettante?

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

Great art can only be created out of love.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.