Walter Benjamin Quotes

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

The fact that the theatregoing public likes my music is no credit to me. There are many other composers who write better music that the public doesn't like.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not.

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Most people respond to my paintings quite generously, but there have been cases where I think people - a few critics in particular - were actually moved by the work but were disturbed by the feelings it evoked, so they attacked it. Some people find the realm of my work quite uncomfortable.

I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric.

Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

I don't think it's a secret that New York tastemakers don't love my work.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.