Kehinde Wiley Quotes

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

You're an enemy of art and I pity your ignorance," Domingo said.

I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer's journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It's not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.

I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.

If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

I can't believe that 100% of the people who stand in art galleries looking at art are thinking, 'Well, here I am, looking at art.' They must be having some sort of other, unselfconscious experience.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.