Perception of Art Quotes

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.'

But I have a problem with the term 'light'. I never in my life knew what to do with that. I know that people have mentioned on some occasions that 'Richter is all about light', and that 'the paintings have a special light', and I never knew what they were talking about. I was never interested in light. Light is there and you turn it on or you turn it off, with sun or without sun. I don't know what the 'problematic of light' is. I take it as a metaphor for a different quality, which is similarly difficult to describe. Good.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.

People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.

Boxing Helena was something that I think was pretty cool, but people judged it without even having seen it. It's not perfect, but I think for the story that we were trying to tell, it turned out pretty good. What it signified was really powerful to me: how society puts us in boxes one way or another.