Art Quotes

“Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.”

-- Camille Paglia

“When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.”

-- Max Beerbohm

“Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“When art wins, everyone wins.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.”

-- Edward Koch

“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

-- Edmund Burke

“Great art picks up where nature ends.”

-- Marc Chagall

“Life is the art of being well deceived and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.”

-- William Hazlitt

“It's clever, but is it Art?”

-- Rudyard Kipling

“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.”

-- Walt Whitman