Tom Stoppard Quotes

I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.

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.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

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

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

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

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.

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.

Once people have seen four or five Henry Moores, they will have a sense of great art.

You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

Art is often defined as a famous masterpiece in a gallery, and we are meant to visit the work and view it to appreciate it. But that is not all there is.

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art.

there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Buying art is not understanding art.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.