Marianne Moore Quotes

You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectlyfutile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

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

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

I don't think the audience goes and thinks of the movie as a piece of art - there are some independent people who may go and have a higher appreciation for filmmaking. It is a great art form, but I don't think you look at a painting and a movie with the same eye.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works.

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

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