Kiki Smith Quotes

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

I think there is beauty in everything. What 'normal' people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it.

All is as beautiful as we think it.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

I like the ideology of there being no such thing as perfection. But I'm of the opinion that I have witnessed perfection at various times, especially in art.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

To find beauty in the most grotesque things is a gift.

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

For he who would proceed aright... should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms... out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.

It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of Sam.

While truth is ultimately convergent, beauty is ultimately divergent. No one can and no one should tell anyone else what that person should consider beautiful.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.