Tom Wolfe Quotes

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that's all it is about is opinions.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

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.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.

I'm an artist, and I like art that gets people talking, good or bad. Criticism is good, too.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.