Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

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

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

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

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

Music's something you feel. You have to feel it first before you hear it.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Art is what can't be proven mathematically, right, it's where science ends. It's the part that makes you feel good, but you don't know why.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

You're lacking a human dimension of some sort if you're not interested in the arts.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

Art is very subjective and having to put numbers on it seems counterintuitive.

Sometimes we do derive some entertainment when we 'appreciate' something, and sometime we feel something when we're moved. So a lot of game makers want challenge themselves with 'can I move someone?' or 'can I get them to respect me as an artist?'

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.