Artistic Hierarchy Quotes

There is no such thing as #1 in art.

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Traditionally, art has been for the select few.

I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.

There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

Traditionally, art has been for the select few. We have been brainwashed to believe that Michelangelo had to pat you on the head at birth.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture but to have it snubbed.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.

You look up at drama, down at comedy. A singer, looking up is okay. A comic, it's death.

I believe in the popularizing of art. But when you get right down to it, it's a bit of an elitist world. Not just economically elitist - how many people read poetry?

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

It's probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.

If you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio - it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again.