Siri Hustvedt Quotes

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

Art is so subjective, and people can react however they want.

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

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

I can't say what makes a picture. I can't say. It's mysterious.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

You can take a picture of New York and one person looking at it will think it looks really depressing, frightening; and someone else will look at it and think of all the fun things you can do in New York. I think songs are kinda like that.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

Please feel free to take this personally.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

Art is an experience, not an object.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.