Fernando Botero Quotes

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.

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.

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

Buying art is not understanding art.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

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.

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

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.

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.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

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.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

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

My exposure to visual art all my life was intensive.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

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

I'm not really well educated - other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

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.

I want to know art.

I have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words.

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

I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.