John Ruskin Quotes

There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

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.

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

The way you would know if someone is famous in the art world is that you would ask your mother. My mother knows who Picasso was. She knows who Warhol was.

When Michelangelo was introduced to Titian, he said... that Titian's colouring and his style much pleased him, but that it was a pity that in Venice men did not learn to draw well from the beginning, and that those painters did not pursue a better method in their studies.

The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

You go to Florence and all the paintings you've seen in books are there. To see them in real life, it just blows your mind.

I love art, painting, and drawing and studying art, like Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

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.

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

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.