Paul Valery Quotes

Overhearing people's conversations about art - that's always entertaining.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.

I am always rethinking how art is perceived and received, questioning our relationship to art. That's always been a constant.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

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

Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Artists talk in 'art speak.'

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

Everybody's an art critic.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

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.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.