T. S. Eliot Quotes

If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Some art needs to be hung on the wall and stared at inquisitively, while other pieces require a more active approach.

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectlyfutile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.

Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

People want to know those details. They think it gives them greater insight into a piece of art, but when they approach a painting in such a manner, they are belittling both the artist’s work and their own ability to experience it. Each painting I do says everything I want to say on its subject and in terms of that painting, and not all the trivia in the world concerning my private life will give the viewer more insight into it than what hangs there before their eyes. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, even titling a work is an unnecessary concession.

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.

It’s like saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder: what appears to be beautiful today may not be judged beautiful in a few years. A perfect example is the Warhol ‘Marilyn’; in the 1960s it was deemed garish. 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.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

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