Willem de Kooning Quotes

The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

There is no best anything in art.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

Every artist paints his Madonna according to his own pre-conceived ideas.

Art is arbitrary but it sort of reveals itself to be right or wrong anyway.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

There is no such thing as #1 in art.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

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

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

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.

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

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.

As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.

My mum is an artist and very into creative expression and freedom.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

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.