Kehinde Wiley Quotes

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

Harmony of colouring is destructive of art? it is like the smile of a fool.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

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.

Art needs to stand for something.

I don't put a great deal of stock in art trophies.