Understanding 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.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art - it reveals something about your willingness to learn.

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

You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.

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

I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric.

Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to [hear it].

If the work is pure then you have to think it could be understood. If it is not understood it doesn't mean that your work is not accessible. It doesn't worry me, but, of course, I would be pleased if people liked my work.

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.

Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don't really understand why until with hindsight.

I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.

I think with anything where you delve into the back story of an artist, it kind of explains their work more intimately.

You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.