Rokia Traore Quotes

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.

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.

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

All art is communication of the artists' ideas, sounds, thoughts; without that no one will support the artist.

People want to be successful, and they want to be acknowledged for what they do. Sometimes they make really great art and aren't. Historically, the best artists weren't. But their work survived.

To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

The way you would know if someone is famous in the art world is that you would ask your mother. My mother knows who Picasso was. She knows who Warhol was.

Good art doesn't really have an expiration date on it. That's something to be happy about, if you're making art.

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.

In general, in painting sometimes people like Picasso or somebody are not very well known in the beginning, sometimes they become well known just before they die, or sometimes after they have died. I think these people start to be artists after they've stopped existing.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

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.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

The first impression and a natural one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now known.

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.

One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.

I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be.

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.

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

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.