Dave Hickey Quotes

Buying art is not understanding 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.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

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

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.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

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.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

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

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

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

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.

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

Fine art is really something I want to get into.

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

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

If we investigate the vague feelings of the average man towards the arts, we find that he is timid and that he has developed a humble belief that art is something which has been invented centuries ago in countries like Greece or Italy and that all we can do about it is study it carefully and apply it.

I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.