Art Judgment Quotes

There is no such thing as #1 in art.

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art - it reveals something about your willingness to learn.

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

Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works.

You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectlyfutile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

I really don't know what's good or bad art because all the art I like people tell me is tasteless.

If it's good art, it's good.

In the Raphael Room, the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.

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.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.

Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

Very rarely is there any confusion as to when a painting or a song is finished. You just know when it's done.