Bess Myerson Quotes

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.

Buying art is not understanding art.

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.

Anyone who doesn't know anything about art knows the name of at least one artist.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Clem had made it known that Pollock was a great painter.

If we investigate the vague feelings of the average man towards the arts, we find that he is timid and that he has developed a humble belief that art is something which has been invented centuries ago in countries like Greece or Italy and that all we can do about it is study it carefully and apply it.

You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

You don't have to be Pope Julius to have great art in your house.