Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

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.

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

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 doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

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 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.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

I think there's art, and then there's illustration. Art comes from a deeper place.

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'.

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.