Quotes by Art Critics - Page 3

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt
the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes, so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined.
John Ruskin
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
John Ashbery
He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
John Ruskin
Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to it's true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must they won't hate you
Frank O'Hara
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
John Ruskin
You just go on your nerve.
Frank O'Hara
Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences")
William S. Wilson
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
Chris Kraus
No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.
John Ruskin
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless peacocks and lilies for instance.
John Ruskin
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
John Berger
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
Robert Hughes
So far, therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the opposite person. . . . It is therefore a science founded on nescience. . . . This science, alone of sciences, must, by all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience. . . . It is therefore peculiarly and alone science of darkness.
John Ruskin
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
Robert Hughes
I have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up
Frank O'Hara
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
John Berger
When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
John Ruskin
This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.
John Berger
To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty
John Ruskin
Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.
Martin Gayford
Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.
Jerry Saltz
Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.
Denis Diderot
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
John Ruskin
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
John Berger
No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin
you know we've all sinned a lot against scienceso we really ought to be as available as an appleon a boughpleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenizationoh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep
Frank O'Hara
Once the frontiers of horror have been crossed, one will pass from form to form beyond the human and from metamorphosis to metamorphosis to accomplish, in the anguish of an impossible return, the most terrible journey to the depths of darkness.
Georges Limbour
After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?
Frank O'Hara
I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")
William S. Wilson
... suffice to say, joy is where you find it- usually on the shelf right next to sadness.
Ingrid Schaffner
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
John Berger
Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.
Chris Kraus
Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.
Chris Kraus
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
Kakuzō Okakura
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin
It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better.
John Ruskin
For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
John Ruskin
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin
...But it is also told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love--two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.
Kakuzō Okakura
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
Robert Hughes
One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.
Kakuzō Okakura
When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leafto turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.There's nothing so spiritual about being happybut you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.
Frank O'Hara
I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I'm drawn to you cause I see how you can help me take my life apart...
Chris Kraus
It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.
Chris Kraus
Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticised and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?
Chris Kraus
Dear Dick, I guess it's been a case of infatuation... Mostly this infatuation-energy is about wanting to know someone.... Whereas the sex-infatuations that's male *you, Shake, the priest) leap out of nowhere, based on not knowing them at all. As if sex could provide the missing clues. Can it? In the cases of the males it's like I felt some kind of hint of who that person was floating under the surface. Wanting sex to realise things I knew.
Chris Kraus
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.
John Berger
There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.
Edwin Mullins
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Okakura Kakuzo
How can one be so serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous?
Kakuzō Okakura
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little cheaper and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin
There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.
Chris Kraus
Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
John Ruskin
… and I’ll be happy here and happy there, fullof tea and tears
Frank O'Hara
The history of medicine is a story of amazing foolishness and amazing intelligence.
Jerome Tarshis
Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.
Chris Kraus
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
John Ashbery
The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation
John Ashbery
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
John Ruskin