Edgard Varese Quotes

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.

Didacticism is the death of art.

Art should never try to be popular.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

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

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

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Art transcends cultural boundaries.

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

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

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

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

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

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.

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'.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

There's no art where there's no fee.

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.