Fred Wilson Quotes

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Beauty is on one level pure surface, and on the other hand, it's the most complex subject that we can touch upon because it says everything about us as people. It's a subject we very quickly begin to argue about. I think that's so interesting.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

Beauty really has such a wide field of interpretation. I guess that's why it's forever fascinating.

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman — or altogether beautiful.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

Why are we willing to accept a new mathematical formula we don't understand as the product of a brilliant mind, while rejecting a new art form we don't understand as the product of a deranged mind?

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint... I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something... Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it... Nothing is important... so everything is important.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

I do not want to repeat myself. I want to reach for something I've never attained. This is the excitement of art.

Art is great. At its best, it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.

I don't understand how people live without creating.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

I think that other people covering my work is really exciting... Im really open to that kind of thing because I think interpretation is an art form.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.