Irving Penn Quotes

Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I become involved with things that speak to me and move me and make me laugh and frighten me.

My feeling at Feyenoord was not that good. I never felt really comfortable.

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

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

Only when you are moved by a painting should you buy it. Being moved is what collecting is all about.

I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

No one should ever be bored. … One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can’t be bored.

You said everything I needed to hear. I'm hooked now. You have me. What are you going to do with me?

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

Art is an experience, not an object.

silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it hides?

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.