Marlene Dumas Quotes

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

Not all art is great; most of it's rubbish.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

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

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

Art is good but it isn't the best.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.

I like art with a sense of humor. I don't have a huge art education to understand everything. I don't think that means that art has to be watered down to the lowest common denominator, though. I don't think you have to go to college to be able appreciate great art, but I like art that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

Art should not be an easy thing.

Even Andy never hung his own paintings. He'd sell them or put them in a box.

Art is a gift and if nobody hears it, that doesn't make it any less of a gift.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

grievance does not make for great art.

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.