Glenn Ligon Quotes

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.

Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.

Buying art is not understanding art.

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

I enjoy looking, learning, smiling, and engaging with art, sometimes even rejecting it.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

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

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.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

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.

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

He is the only politician who knows anything about art.

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.

Often, when art from the canon is brought in to fine art classes, it is used as a prop to inspire art-making projects but more rarely as something to study in-depth for itself.

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

If I had been in the gallery, I'd have gone home.

I have a strong art-history background.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

Shouldn't a great museum foster serious seeing before all else?

I am always rethinking how art is perceived and received, questioning our relationship to art. That's always been a constant.