Charles Saatchi Quotes

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

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I don't enjoy art.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

I am very sensitive to all form of music, painting, sculpting, dancing, and I love cinema also. For example if I look at the work of the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who happens to be a friend of mine, everything he does is inspiring to me.

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

We love high-end art, but when you're looking at high-end art in music, a lot of the time, it's appreciated academically, but you can't feel it as much.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

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

In my own life, I share my home with works by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Jackie Windsor and so many others, whose creativity is clear and fresh and compelling; the works break through the usual, and they inspire creativity; they inspire responses and understanding.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.