Top 100 Bad Art Quotes
#1. Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.
Gerhard Richter
#2. There are bad types and good types, and the whole science and art of typography begins after the first category has been set aside.
Beatrice Warde
#3. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign
John Gardner
#4. John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.
Jerry Saltz
#5. In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people, ... [t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
#6. It's not communism, it's shouldn't be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It's our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the best people.
Amy Poehler
#7. Hatchery fish have the same colours, but they always seem muted like bad reproductions of great art.
Bill Barich
#8. Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Walter Darby Bannard
#9. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Aldous Huxley
#10. Usually in France we prefer to say bad things about the Nouvelle Vague, but I'm always impressed with its freedom and the fact of not making a film to give your opinion but just as a piece of art, which to me means the Nouvelle Vague.
Arnaud Desplechin
#11. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#12. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#13. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
#14. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.
Ove Arup
#15. We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
Billy Al Bengston
#16. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
#17. I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.
Jerry Saltz
#18. In my opinion, if you want to pursue an art, especially acting, you have to be really perceptive of what people go through. There is so much bad in the world, and I think that acting it out and exploring it almost helps you deal with it.
Rita Volk
#19. Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.
Robert Gottlieb
#20. People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.
William Quigley
#21. I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.
Xavier Dolan
#22. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
#23. Art is for entertainment purposes, but it's also to reflect our dreams, our hopes, the present, the future the past - whether it's good or bad.
Amber Valletta
#24. Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.
Ilka Chase
#25. Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
Alain De Botton
#26. Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
Don DeLillo
#27. It would be a really bad idea to let this person loose."
"How bad of an idea?"
"Kicking-Hitler-out-of-art-school bad.
Rin Chupeco
#28. If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
Marcel Duchamp
#29. 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
#30. There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
Anatole Broyard
#31. My first film was a movie shot in 1974. I was 18 on that movie set. It was called 'Big Bad Mama.' I turned 19 on the next movie I worked on, which was a black 'Blazing Saddles.' I worked in the art department. It was called 'Darktown Strutters.'
Bill Paxton
#32. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#33. Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.
Chuck Jones
#34. O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,
And we join to'it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to'advance.
John Donne
#35. The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw
#37. Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
Oscar Wilde
#38. Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.
John Sununu
#39. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.
Chaim Potok
#41. An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I'm afraid to say, has been understood.
Jo Nesbo
#42. I like science and I love gym. Oh, and I like art, but I'm really bad at it. I'm just a terrible drawer. I can't draw a circle. Even with a ruler, I can't draw a straight line.
Daniel Radcliffe
#43. A battle that you win cancels any other bad action of yours. In the same way, by losing one, all the good things worked by you before become vain.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#44. People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Joe Jackson
#45. It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.
David Edelstein
#46. We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish ... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.
Koushun Takami
#47. For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.
Damien Hirst
#48. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art
although it may possibly be very good journalism?
Sherwood Anderson
#49. I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.
Nick Cave
#50. I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#51. Bad art has the power to deform a people just as good art generates new reflection, growth, vision, and hope.
Michel O'Brien
#52. Salad can get a bad rap. People think of bland and watery iceberg lettuce, but in fact, salads are an art form, from the simplest rendition to a colorful kitchen-sink approach.
Marcus Samuelsson
#53. Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.
Salvador Dali
#54. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.
Oscar Wilde
#55. It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#56. The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
Charles De Lint
#57. Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, that which all things aim at.
Aristotle.
#58. There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.
Joe Wright
#59. When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty.
Marlene Dumas
#60. Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
Andy Warhol
#63. It quite often makes me feel sad that painting's like a bad mistress one might have, who's always spending, spending and it's never enough.. [Letter 630, Arles, 23 June 1888]
Vincent Van Gogh
#64. It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.
Theodore Roszak
#65. All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
William, Saroyan
#66. When you are 'bad' in the art world they are very very scared! They want to control you ... and they can't! Individuality and uniqueness are threats to the status quo. It is an artist's job to be an 'outlaw.
Laurence Gartel
#67. All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.
Joyce Cary
#68. Well, every art requires appreciation, doesn't it? I mean people who paint, sculpt, or write books want an audience. that's the reason they're doing it for, and it's the same when you're a cook. You need somebody who savours it, not one who just says, 'Oh it's not bad.
Margaret Powell
#69. Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion.
David G. McAfee
#70. Most works of art are, necessarily, bad ... ; one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
#71. Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.
Jerry Saltz
#72. I had something like a revelation: why did we keep making new art, and so much of it so bad, when we were surrounded by work that needed only the proper context to shine?
Brendan Mathews
#73. Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon.
Bruno Zevi
#74. What I have in mind is that 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 that a bad emotion is still an emotion.
Marcel Duchamp
#75. At the Big Bad Lab, we build participatory art and media platforms for causes, communities and organizations we care about.
Cameron Russell
#76. Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.
Dennis Potter
#77. Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.
Frank Wedekind
#78. But I'm interested in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. I hear there are some of the worst Matisses there. I like seeing bad art by good artists. It's inspiring. I'm able to identify with them. It makes them real.
Jemima Kirke
#79. Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.
Rebecca West
#80. I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."
Scott Avett
#81. BE GRATEFUL EVEN for hardship, setbacks, and bad people. Dealing with such obstacles is an essential part of training in the Art of Peace.
Morihei Ueshiba
#82. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#83. My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
Peter Schjeldahl
#84. The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E.F. Schumacher
#85. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.
Madeleine L'Engle
#86. Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.
Arshile Gorky
#87. A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.
Muriel Rukeyser
#88. To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.
Karsten Harries
#89. Newsmen winding up the nation, a little bad news helps circulation, pass on the panic to the population.
Ray Davies
#90. There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.
Ron Brackin
#91. There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.
Paul Cezanne
#92. Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.
Walter Darby Bannard
#93. Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.
Gerhard Richter
#94. I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing.
Sally Hawkins
#95. Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.
Russell Simmons
#96. Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.
Harvey Pekar
#97. I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.
Christopher Meloni
#98. Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.
Robert Anton Wilson
#99. Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life.
John Darnielle
#100. Most human beings are, unfortunately, ugly enough without putting glasses upon them, and to disfigure any of the really beautiful faces that we have with such contrivances is surely as bad as putting an import tax upon art. As for putting glasses upon a child it is enough to make the angels weep.
William H. Bates
