Oscar Wilde Quotes

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Fashion, for me, is anything that's aesthetic and beautiful. Art, food, film. It's something that I appreciate and really like.

If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

All political art is bad – all good art is political.

Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

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

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

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.

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.