Jerry Saltz Quotes

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

Museum of Modern Art doesn't have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn't be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don't have a measuring device.

They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

I'd live in a museum if I could. I used to spend hours and hours in the Museum of Modern Art.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

A lot of people change their band names because they're looking for a change of atmosphere.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water.

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Painting is more important than art.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.