Caroline Gordon Quotes

The value of art is in the observer.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

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

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

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.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

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

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

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

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Now, there are so many movies, so many festivals, and so many awards going on, each judged with each other, like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.

I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

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

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

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.

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