Art Analysis Quotes

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.

I've always wished that I had a great ability to verbalize art theory and find a way that I fit in to the whole lineage, but I don't have a clue.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them.

A painted surface is a real, living form.

I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, 'This is cute!'

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

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.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.