Bob Ross Quotes

Traditionally, art has been for the select few. We have been brainwashed to believe that Michelangelo had to pat you on the head at birth.

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.

I believe in the popularizing of art. But when you get right down to it, it's a bit of an elitist world. Not just economically elitist - how many people read poetry?

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can't get into them. That's the point.

When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle.

Language does not make one an elite.

I try to not be or associate with elitists.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

I'm not very sympathetic to the tendency to bring art to the people.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.

I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be entrusted with power

… an army of Gatsbys wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.

Davos is probably the world's most elite society, but it dresses itself up as a non-elite event. Don't be fooled. You must wear a specially coloured badge, which shrieks your status to others.

Art is the job of the privileged.

Everyone hates the best clubs, it is as simple as that.

The art world's quite elitist. I tend to skirt around that world.

In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted.

Money messes up everything. It ruins art. The second you start putting price tags on this stuff, it's... Art isn't for just the wealthy. It's for everybody to enjoy.

Although the rudiments of snobbery are there, its finer developments are basically alien to the Australian soul - that is, if Australians have a soul; many people believe that they are too matter-of-fact and down-to-earth to have such fancy commodities.