Camille Paglia Quotes

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

It’s like saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder: what appears to be beautiful today may not be judged beautiful in a few years. A perfect example is the Warhol ‘Marilyn’; in the 1960s it was deemed garish. Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn’t mean having read a few art history books.

Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.

People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

Everybody's an art critic.

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.

I wanted to go into art history. Acting fell into my lap when a neighbor took pictures of me and showed them to an agent.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Michael Jackson National African American Art Examiner Series

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side

What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

Connoisseurs think the art is already done.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

If you're starting to lose your faith in the general intelligence of the American populous, there's nothing like them mistaking pop culture for Van Gogh as a sign that people still read their history books and care about art.

Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable... they give the idea of a whole.

In fact, every day I'll read a chapter of some art book. I don't know why. It's just a habit.

Critics of art are like eunuchs in harem. They see how it's done when the men come to see the women, but they can't do it themselves.