Thomas Hoving Quotes

#1. The 'Artful Tommy' will never change - and perhaps shouldn't.

Thomas Hoving

#2. No matter how hard I tried to popularize, I never cheapened a great work of art.

Thomas Hoving

#3. There have been countless changes in the long history of art. The most significant have been brought about by the genius of a single artist.

Thomas Hoving

#4. Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.

Thomas Hoving

#5. I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.

Thomas Hoving

#6. Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.

Thomas Hoving

#7. If you don't work yourself up into a fever of greed and covetousness in an art museum, you're just not doing the job.

Thomas Hoving

#8. My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field.

Thomas Hoving

#9. The only enemy of art is taste.

Thomas Hoving

#10. The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago ...

Thomas Hoving

#11. The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.

Thomas Hoving

#12. With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

Thomas Hoving

#13. To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.

Thomas Hoving

#14. Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

Thomas Hoving

#15. Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Thomas Hoving

#16. Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!

Thomas Hoving

#17. Utopia would mean a park - some large, some small - every four or five blocks.

Thomas Hoving