Hermann Broch Quotes

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film.

There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or 'real' art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

I don't think it's an unnatural thing at all for my collaborations or projects to be seen as art but entertainment at the same time.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

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.

No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.