Munira Mirza Quotes

I have a strong art-history background.

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Buying art is not understanding art.

I enjoy looking, learning, smiling, and engaging with art, sometimes even rejecting it.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

But I'm interested in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. I hear there are some of the worst Matisses there. I like seeing bad art by good artists. It's inspiring. I'm able to identify with them. It makes them real.

Fine art is really something I want to get into.

Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

If we investigate the vague feelings of the average man towards the arts, we find that he is timid and that he has developed a humble belief that art is something which has been invented centuries ago in countries like Greece or Italy and that all we can do about it is study it carefully and apply it.

I would have been an artist, because I studied art and history in school and college.

If I ever go back to college, I'd study art education.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.