John Maeda Quotes

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

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

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.

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

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

A good piece of art raises questions.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.