Art Legacy Quotes

You never write a theme for a movie thinking, 'This will live forever.'

Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.

I love the way art moves people emotionally. I love the fact that when someone purchases art it is the one thing that will last for generations.

Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read.

Every work of art changes its predecessors.

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.

I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.

I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences.

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

Good art doesn't really have an expiration date on it.

As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

The beauty of an art project is that you cannot always measure the impact, but one day it can become clear.

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

Here were also moments of, you know, you have an exhibition: no sale, no reviews. It's hard not to get blue, and I think the kids were very aware of those periods. So if there's anything they've picked up, it's a kind of resiliency. That seems like a pretty good legacy.