Kara Walker Quotes

All art is about appealing to emotion.

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

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

Sometimes art is just about getting a reaction, that's really the end-all be-all.

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 something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Things that bring out your emotions are what should be in theaters and in books. That's what art is. It makes you feel things.

I'm the type of artist who touches people, that's the type of artist that I am.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

All I do is hope that someone feels something from listening to my music.

I want to make people feel something - that's really cool.

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.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

I feel like emotional content is the most important of any song, for any artist.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.