Art Commentary Quotes

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. 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.

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo, 'This is what salvation must be like after a while.' But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.

Critics of art are like eunuchs in harem. They see how it's done when the men come to see the women, but they can't do it themselves.

I used to write reviews for 'Artbomb.' Our policy was to only cover books we loved and recommended.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.

Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

Overhearing people's conversations about art - that's always entertaining.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.