Franz Grillparzer Quotes

A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.

The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

Listen! There was never an artistic period. There was never an art-loving nation.

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

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.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.