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I really think there's no difference between an art piece made by a man and one made by a woman. Is it a good art piece or a bad art piece? Of course, if you're female, you're maybe dealing with different issues. (Marina Abramovic)
I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay. (Scott Adams)
Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to. (Greg Anderson)
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law. (Aristotle)
The chances are that in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor. (W. H. Auden)
The sole equality on earth is death. (Philip James Bailey)
When anything goes, everything goes. (Darby Bannard)
In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad. (Darby Bannard)
Hold yourself for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. (Henry Ward Beecher)
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. (Alain de Botton)
If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly. (Ashleigh Brilliant)
To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States. (George W. Bush)
And what is writ is writ – / Would it were worthier! (Lord Byron)
-Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking...
Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform. (Susan Cain)
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art. (Marc Chagall)
To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a god. (Anton Chekhov)
Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know. (Pema Chodron)
Good is the enemy of great. (Jim Collins, author)
There are different standards in art and different disciplines - no single one that is more 'correct,' 'professional' or 'better' than the other. (Anne Copeland)
Art is completely subjective. It's up to the viewer to judge whether or not it has merit. (Ken Danby)
When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad. (Miles Davis)
Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. (Ernest Dimnet)
Good art provokes emotion and thought. (David Dory)
Bad art is forgotten by the viewer in the amount of time that it takes to look at something else. (David Dory)
Why are there so few voices against 'the dark, grotesque, ordinary and totally unskilled art'? Perhaps we have become victims of loud voices screaming for all-inclusiveness. (Les Ducak)
-The Creative Act, Art News, 1957...
Art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion. (Marcel Duchamp)
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. (Henry van Dyke)
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough. (Roger Ebert)
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. (T. S. Eliot)
Beware, so long as you live, of judging men by their outward appearance. (Jean de La Fontaine)
It was a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal
treatment of unequals. (Felix Frankfurter)
For anyone to dictate what is right or wrong in art, good or bad in art, is like telling us who we are, or should be. (Jane Freeman)
Men are born equal but they are also born different. (Erich Fromm)
Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad? (Frank Gehry)
The painting world is awash with people who cannot paint. This is a condition that would not be tolerated in other professions such as Dentistry, Medicine, or among members of the Airline Pilot's Association. (Robert Genn)
Art thrives on a difference of opinion. My treasure is your junk, sort of thing. Life would be dull if we all agreed. (Robert Genn)
In life and art we need to make sure that we honour that which our hearts and brains tell us is good. And we should cast a philosophic yet curious smile at that which our hearts and brains tell us otherwise. (Robert Genn)
Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred. (Gunther Grass)
Your own standards have to be higher and more scrupulous than those of critics. (Irwin Greenberg)
-b.1795 d.1829...
Their houses are new, but their prejudices are old. (Alexander Griboyedov)
There is no standard way of using painting techniques. (Wu Guan-Zhong)
There was a traditional view that I grew up with. Artists had a high calling. They should not let things out of their studio that were bad. (Peter Halley)
There is a realization [in the schools] that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings. (Edith Hamilton)
I forgot the defective can be more than the whole. (Thomas Hardy)
If someone offers to furnish a sure test, ask what the test was which made the sure test sure. (Henry S. Haskins)
But I could never make a judgement that something was obscene. (Damien Hirst)
-on amateur music-making...
If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly. (Gustav Holst)
No art goes unmediated by other art. (Robert Hughes)
Forget the 'experts', award-givers, and dealers. Your personal 'high standards' are known only to you, and are necessary. (Marvin Humphrey)
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. (Aldous Huxley)
It was a really interesting time in New York in the late '70s and early '80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music. It was more about your desire to express things. (Jim Jarmusch)
He who praises everybody praises nobody. (Samuel Johnson)
Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on. (Asger Jorn)
We classify too much and enjoy too little. (Okakura Kakuzo)
If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered 'dangerous' but set in place in their compartmental understandings. (Jack Kerouac)
Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. (Michael Kimmelman)
The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across? (Franz Kline)
In the end, the test of a work of art is our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good. (Stanley Kubrick)
The public cannot be expected to jury. (A. C. Leighton)
-college art teacher...
Ninety-five percent of everything is crap. (Corban LePell)
There are no absolutes in Art. One simply cannot say what is Art or what in art is good or bad. There are some standards to which artists should adhere to, but even then these standards are ambiguous and nebulous. (Corban LePell)
In America, the biggest is the best. (Roy Lichtenstein)
Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
We often hear of bad weather, but in reality no weather is bad. It is all delightful, though in
different ways. Some weather may be bad for farmers or crops, but for man all kinds are
good. Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating. (John Lubbock)
-on Bruce Nauman...
He abandoned painting because he could see that other people were better at it than he was and he didn't really feel like being second best. (Ian MacMillan)
There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority. (Orison Swett Marden)
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. (Abraham Maslow)
It's a fact that not all art is created equal and the natural process where talent and quality rise to the top will continue to happen over time. (Bill Mayberry, art dealer)
To me, there's two types of songs, good and bad. And I just like to stick with the good ones. (Reba McEntire)
In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting. (Michelangelo)
Judged shows usually mean, 'It all has to look like our stuff.' (Damar Minyak)
I would advise young artists... to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly... If their painting doesn't improve by itself, it means that nothing can be done – and I wouldn't do anything! (Claude Monet)
However bad an artist, his work is his life; the worse it is the greater his vanity. (Alfred Munnings)
Spiritual and emotional content are not to easy to evaluate. (Stephen Nachmanovitch)
Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it. (Alice Neel)
There are no recognised parameters which segregate the artistic fraternity into different groups apart from their chosen subjects. (Leonard Niles)
-Animal Farm, 1945...
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. (George Orwell)
I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it. (Robert B. Parker)
I like all painting. I always look at the paintings – good or bad – in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels... I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine. (Pablo Picasso)
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. (Ezra Pound)
The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuses to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable. (Herbert Read)
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything. (Ad Reinhardt)
Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste. (Diego Rivera)
One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence. (Harold Rosenberg)
The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms. (Susan Rothenberg)
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish... to do otherwise is to legitimize it. (Salman Rushdie)
-on art fairs, New York Magazine...
Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine. (Jerry Saltz)
Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal talents. (Herbert Samuel)
Bad art may be not so much the product of an untutored brush as that of a lazy mind. (Ian Semple)
Comparisons are odious. (William Shakespeare)
If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad. (George Bernard Shaw)
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different – a supplementary – set of standards. (Susan Sontag)
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides. (William Stafford)
-when asked how she knew good art...
It makes me itch. (Gertrude Stein)
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals. (John Steinbeck)
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography [creative arts] for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent. (Alfred Stieglitz)
Ninety percent of everything is crap. (Theodore Sturgeon)
Artists need not meet any standards to practice their craft... Virtually every other occupation requires some sort of license, union membership or something that says you are qualified. (Mike Svob)
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
Once in a golden hour, / I cast to earth a seed, / And up there grew a flower, / That others called a weed. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
'Ordinary' is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (Studs Terkel)
Any artist who doesn't think he's the best should quit. (Harold Town)
Were I to begin life over again I would not hesitate to paint portraits cheap and slight, for the mass of folks can't judge the merits of a well-finished picture. (John Vanderlyn)
It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality. Its sovereign
law is subordination and dependence. (Marquis de Vauvenargues)
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference. (Voltaire)
The difference between art and good art is that the latter can be seen, felt and heard. (Milos Vujasinovic)
I have said this many times in the past and will say it many times in the future I am sure: some people need to find a different hobby... (Jimmy Wales)
- on the 'big eyed' Keane paintings...
It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it. (Andy Warhol)
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. (Alan Watts)
A good design poorly executed is much to be preferred over a poor design well executed. (Edgar A. Whitney)
If you are not honest about your level of ability, you may work a painting to death in the attempt to achieve a standard of excellence that you are not yet capable of realizing. This is true for all of us... don't sabotage your efforts... celebrate the courage and perseverance each painting represents. (Eric Wiegardt)
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. (Oscar Wilde)
The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. (Oscar Wilde)
Good, bad, or indifferent – it doesn't matter, just work. (Shelley Winters)
An age is best revealed by its artists of the second rank. (Geoffrey Wolff)
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. (William Butler Yeats)
What separates a brilliant artist from a good one? One is brilliant. (Miles Patrick Yohnke)
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