Jeff Koons Quotes

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

My exposure to visual art all my life was intensive.

I have a strong art-history background.

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Often, when art from the canon is brought in to fine art classes, it is used as a prop to inspire art-making projects but more rarely as something to study in-depth for itself.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

Buying art is not understanding art.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

I want to know art.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

I have long been a fan and enthusiast where art is concerned.

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I'm just a fan of art and culture.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

I wanted to go into art history. Acting fell into my lap when a neighbor took pictures of me and showed them to an agent.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.