Aesthetic Judgement Quotes

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

Sometimes there's something that a writer doesn't see or a producer doesn't see when he's looking at a shot.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

Wherefore the mere practical architect is not able to assign sufficient reasons for the forms he adopts; and the theoretic architect also fails, grasping the shadow instead of the substance.

Sometimes when you're looking at your own work, you can't really see, and it's only when you step back a little bit later that you think, 'Oh, that's completely in line with everything else I've done.'

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I think it is no small attraction in a painter to be able to give a pleasing air to his figures, and whoever is not naturally possessed of this grace may acquire it by study, as opportunity offers in the following manner: be on the watch to take good parts of many beautiful faces of which the beautiful parts are established by general repute rather than by your own judgement, for you may deceive yourself by selecting faces that resemble your own, since it often seems that such similarities please us; ... so therefore choose the beautiful ones as I tell you and fix them in your mind.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

When I read a review, 90% of the review is about my lifestyle, and the last two sentences are about the record.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

I'm not totally blind to the fact that I like people to see my work, but if it's not something I would enjoy seeing in a magazine, then I think I shouldn't be making it. I think that I don't represent only myself, I represent more people; I mean, if I like it, then I think more people will like it because I think I'm quite a normal guy.

I'm useless at staring at a piece of white paper. But if you put a piece of white paper with a black line on it in front of me, I'll say no that black line should be red and it should go this way or that way.

Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.

An artist must be open to both appreciation and criticism. It's a part of the learning process, or else there is no growth.

Art requires choices, the more specific, the better.

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

For the most part, works of mine are untitled. There was a brief period where I had poetic titles for works, and they're embarrassing now. I think, for the most part, it's not something that I have talent for.