Art Discourse 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.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.

Art in progress. MAK has occupied a unique and valuable space as international host for discourse between the arts and architecture.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

What is needed in the theater, in fact for all our art forms, is a vibrant critical tradition.

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

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!

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

Artists talk in 'art speak.'

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that's all it is about is opinions.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.

People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

I buy some art but I don't like to talk about it.

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

The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.