Clive Bell Quotes

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

Anything that is beautiful is beautiful just as it is. Praise forms no part of its beauty, since praise makes things neither better nor worse. This applies even more to what it commonly called beautiful: natural objects, for example, or works of art. True beauty has no need of anything beyond itself.

Beauty is its own excuse.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

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

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?