Jack White Quotes

I have a suggestion for all of those award seekers and blue ribbon hunters. Spend your efforts on making art that connects with people. Awards impress the grandkids but they don't move the gauge on selling your product. Art needs to touch the emotions of the buyer.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.

It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.

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

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

It is not the style but the quality and emotional impact of work that makes it marketable. Unless we make art that connects with people, we won't sell much, no matter what the style or subject.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

I doubt that VR will really replace the quality of books. If you want to go into let's say the Prado in Madrid and you want to go into Hieronymus Bosch or whatever, you'd rather go into books and you take your time and it's sitting there all day long and you go back and revisit it and it becomes part of your physical life.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

The great challenge is how to make smart, intelligent art that can speak to everybody.

I don't put a great deal of stock in art trophies.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.

I don't understand why anyone would collect my work. Please understand... it's like writing Our House. It took me an hour, it was 30 years ago, get over it! But people say, No, no, it changed my life, and I don't understand that. I can't take that seriously as a producer of what I consider to be art. If they want to collect it, fantastic. If you see what I saw when I took it and it means something to you, then by all means collect it. If I make some money, um, fine.