William James Quotes

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

The value of art is in the observer.

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

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

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.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

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.

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.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.

Art is arbitrary but it sort of reveals itself to be right or wrong anyway.

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.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.