Frank Crowninshield Quotes

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

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.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

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

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

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

I feel that all good art is powerful and simple.

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

I've come to believe in the primacy of form - the notion of art seducing you through your senses, through your eyeballs.

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

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.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

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

A great painting is a great painting.

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

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Art is the ultimate luxury good, but one that can make you think, give a you a blast of beauty and enhance your life. Even if the work's made of plasticine.

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.

If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games are good for us but whether they are good, full stop.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

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

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

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.