Kenneth Clark Quotes

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

It should be quite clear that it is possible for unpleasant people who are small in various ways other than in their artistic genius to produce great art. Art and morality have no necessary connection.

Sometimes we do derive some entertainment when we 'appreciate' something, and sometime we feel something when we're moved. So a lot of game makers want challenge themselves with 'can I move someone?' or 'can I get them to respect me as an artist?'

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.