Georg Baselitz Quotes

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 have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

An uninspiring canvas becomes a glamorous masterpiece when it is reattributed to a better-known artist.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

Artists don't compare themselves to each other based on money. Nobody really knows what money other artists have. They don't care that much. The measure is the work and how you think your work is perceived. How the museums are. How you are doing.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

A great painting is a great painting.

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or 'real' art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.

If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games are good for us but whether they are good, full stop.

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

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'.

An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.