Mark Morris Quotes

I would like beautiful gymnastics to be recognized as the best. I want the judges to appreciate things that are not necessarily winning points.

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 think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it's all make-believe.

To me, the technique was almost irrelevant; it was what was coming across.

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

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

Without audiences, artists would be doing something else, and their creative and technical skills would fall on absent eyes.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Sometimes during a ballet I'll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.

If nobody comes to your shows, then it's modern dance. If everybody comes to your shows and no one likes it, is that ballet? I don't know.

I believe that true art is universal in its appeal.

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.

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

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 matters.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.

For a performer, passion is far more important than technical skills. If a dancer's leg isn't at a perfect angle, I can see past that, but if someone's dead in the face, it's really boring.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?