Denis Dutton Quotes

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

I really like the pop culture materials of everyday life, but used in some way that elevates them to something you notice and care about.

On one level, of course, the notion of judging films or books or music against each other is completely ridiculous. Who's to say '12 Years A Slave' is a better film than 'The Wolf of Wall Street'? Or that one album in a certain genre is better than another in a completely different genre?

I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

The educator and the public need to have an opportunity to discuss why certain art is important.

It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of [a work], outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke.

In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.

There are a lot of people who are considered 'camp' who have no idea how ridiculous they are.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

I want the ballet world to be given the respect that it deserves and to be seen by more people - for so many to experience the beauty that I've received from the ballet world.

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.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be 'so bad they were good'. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.