John Constable Quotes

Artists don't compare themselves to each other based on money. Nobody really knows what money other artists have. They don't care that much. The measure is the work and how you think your work is perceived. How the museums are. How you are doing.

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

I didn't become a commercially successful artist by design, and actually I think that commercially successful just means, if you analyse it, that a lot of people like you. It's become a dirty word, and I don't necessarily think it needs to be.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

I never wanted to be someone who's asking someone to put my work in their gallery. I wanted to be asked.

Obviously, artists need to make money and stuff like that, but if you do something good or if you make good art or make good stuff, the wealth will find you in some way.

Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Art is all about becoming a name, a brand; it isn't based on talent or creativity.

Great art is not instant. It comes from experience, it comes from a place within. If you're trying to generate material, then you're going to generate stuff. It's not going to be great, it's just going to be stuff.

Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

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 sculptor, the painter the musician the dancer, or any artist, if he can first obtain celebrate in Paris, acquires very easily the esteem and eulogy of other countries.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

People want to be successful, and they want to be acknowledged for what they do. Sometimes they make really great art and aren't. Historically, the best artists weren't. But their work survived.