Greil Marcus Quotes

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

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

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

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

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

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.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

I enjoy looking, learning, smiling, and engaging with art, sometimes even rejecting it.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

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.

I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.

And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture.