Artistic Debate Quotes

[I am not for] spending the public money in the encouragement of the Fine Arts. Whether it is to be painting or sculpture, or both; if painting, what sort of painting, what are to be the subjects chosen, and who are to be the artists employed? All these questions furnish ample food for discussion, difference, and dispute.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

There's no being wrong in seeing something in art, only being disagreed with.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

I think a lot of the most interesting work in art and in films are often kind of polarized opinions and affect people in very different ways, which may be less successful commercially, but they elicit a dialogue that's quite interesting.

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

If art is singular expression, then by nature, the best art is controversial. But when art stirs debate for reasons besides its artistic integrity, that's when things get bent.

I'm an artist, and I like art that gets people talking, good or bad. Criticism is good, too.

No design, no matter how common or seemingly insignificant, is without its adamant critics as well as its ardent admirers.

I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

Good art should be polarizing.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting - the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there... What you see is what you see.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods.

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.