Tino Sehgal Quotes

I am always rethinking how art is perceived and received, questioning our relationship to art. That's always been a constant.

One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.

Too often, it is presumed that young people will only like art that they can immediately relate to. Working-class students may be steered towards popular culture like hip-hop, new media and film on the basis that they will find older art forms such as opera or ballet irrelevant.

Buying art is not understanding art.

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.

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 was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.

I love the idea of bringing my work to the general public, not just people who go to gallery openings.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

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.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

Unfortunately, the general interest in art among the Japanese is very low compared to that of Western countries. I would love to be able to correct that by bringing many more pieces of interesting artwork to Japan.

Art should be for everyone, not just the rich.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of 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.

I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.

I feel like we have to fight for art.

Norman Rockwell - even though we think of him as a great American artist, in a lot of museums he has not garnered that kind of attention. And it's this kind of accessibility that we're trying to bring - not looking down on any art.

I think the audiences abroad are older and come from a more mature society. They have a different understanding of whats happening as art.