Oscar Wilde Quotes

The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.

It's difficult sometimes to go and see a show and enjoy it and not go and see a show and critique it.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

I think art, at its best, happens on a conscious and a subconscious level.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

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 have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.