Alberto Giacometti Quotes

Past art is subject to change.

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.

You can tell if it's a good collection if people are afraid of it. In ten years, everyone will love it.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

I came to Nantes two-years-ago and it's much the same today, except that it's totally different.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

History didn't begin yesterday.

Tradition, by its very nature, includes continuous change.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.

Today's headlines and history's judgment are rarely the same. If you are too attentive to the former, you will most certainly not do the hard work of securing the latter.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

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.

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

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.