Fred Kaplan Quotes

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

A few gentlemen in Congress have suggested that there is something not quite moral about dancing…. Dancing is an art and people who practice that art work hard and faithfully to perfect themselves. I think they should command our respect, just as all other good workers do.

The best of any artist is in their art.

In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

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.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

There's no art where there's no fee.

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

Art should never try to be popular.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.