Jasper Johns Quotes

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

If what you want to do is make good art, decide what's good and try to imitate it.

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

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

If it's good art, it's good.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.

As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

Art is significant deformity.

Art is good but it isn't the best.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

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.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.