Aesthetic Response Quotes

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.

In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.

And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.

Sensibility... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

The people who love my paintings, that respond to them the most, they're spectators, they're not viewers.

There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

There aren't reasons why you like this song or this piece of music, or don't like it. It's just, it's either right or wrong, you know?

Vision evokes emotion. There is no such thing as an emotionless vision.

I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.

There is always the working out of things, and you have to have sort of a gut response to it. And an intellectual response. And an aesthetic response. All that comes from having done this for a long time. Instead of saying, "That's a really good rock track, and that will do," I'm looking for something that is more original and fresh. There are a lot of elements to get into it: a level or sophistication, passion and excitement.

When you're moved by music, that's always good.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

I think young people have a wonderful reaction to color because it's not screwed up by too many references.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.