James Fenton Quotes

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

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.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.

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?

A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

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.

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.

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

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 have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words.

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

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

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.

There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?