Robert Adams Quotes

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

I'd like to work with Damien Hirst.

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

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

And you know, art as commerce, doesn't really make too much sense, they don't go together.

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

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.

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

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.

I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art.