Aesthetic Judgment Quotes

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

I don't listen to my songs. The only time I do it is when someone points out a flaw in the end product.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.

It is the wise man's part to leave in darkness everything that is ugly.

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

Good taste is the enemy of creativity.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

When I'm sitting in the studio, a mix isn't done till I feel it in my gut.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Ugliness is a point of view; an ulcer is wonderful to a pathologist.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

It is impossible that beauty should ever distinctly appreciate itself.

Unfortunately most criticism is by poseurs. They use their comments about someone else's work as a platform on which to strike poses. What they're really saying is: "Look at me! Look at me!"

Passion paralyzes good taste.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Never judge a work of art by its defects.