James Acaster Quotes

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.

I don't understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I'm amazed what people come up with when they look at them. There's one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

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.

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

A work of art doesn't exist outside the perception of the audience.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

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.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

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

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

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

Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.

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

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

Exposing yourself to many kinds of art can only lead to amazing things. It helps you learn about your own art, your own taste, what kind of art you want to create for yourself.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

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.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

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