Ben Katchor Quotes

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

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

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I feel that all good art is powerful and simple.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.

Every time we do anything artistic, the way it's perceived is always going to be different from the way that we had intended it to be because it's subjective.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

What does art mean to me? I never really think about the 'meaning' of art. Yet, obviously, that's what I do.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

In other things the knowing artist may Judge better than the people; but a play, (Made for delight, and for no other use) If you approve it not, has no excuse.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.