Art Reception Quotes

I don't think anyone would want to come to my gallery show.

You never know when what you do in the arts means something to people, and you never really know if you've been received well.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

I was in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 1994 'Black Male' show at the Whitney, and I've never seen such vicious press. Twenty plus years later, critics who hated that Biennial have come to Jesus and decided it was a really important, seminal show that they misunderstood.

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

I am always rethinking how art is perceived and received, questioning our relationship to art. That's always been a constant.

What I find interesting is this ricochet effect, that the audience perceives the work and then does something with it, throws it back to the world, and there's an ongoing interaction between work and audience, which doesn't belong to the artist anymore - from the moment you release it, it doesn't belong to anybody.

Being in a room full of my art makes me incredibly nervous because the work always gets damaged when it's shown, and I hate my openings.

For me, it's important to ask what are you making, and what's the public's relationship to that. And I say public relationship because I don't really care so much about any sort of reception.

My films seem to be better understood and better received by the monthly publications. On television the first reactions are usually unfavorable.