Sean Lock Quotes

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

Buying art is not understanding art.

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

My exposure to visual art all my life was intensive.

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

I'm a huge art buff.

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.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

I think it's probably the Dutch who are to blame for starting the whole 'art business', because before they came along, art was attached to relatively stable structures, and it was everybody's. It was like going to the movies.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.

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.

Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

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

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.

I love art; I collect mostly modern art.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.