Art Historians Quotes

Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.

Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality.

I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake - they've always been there - but the pirates who've taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.

Museums and galleries do recruit art historians, but they are overwhelmingly white and middle class, or else from abroad. They understandably fret about the lack of diversity in their curating departments, but is it any wonder?

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.