Bad Art Quotes

#1. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

John Gardner

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Alain De Botton

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Oscar Wilde

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Bad art has the power to deform a people just as good art generates new reflection, growth, vision, and hope.

Michel O'Brien

#13. 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

#14. All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

William, Saroyan

#15. 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

#16. Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

Dennis Potter

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

Peter Schjeldahl

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.

Walter Darby Bannard

#25. If you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

Stephen King

#26. Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.

Jane Lynch

#27. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

Madeleine L'Engle

#28. I really don't know what's good or bad art because all the art I like people tell me is tasteless.

Ed Sheeran

#29. There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.

Neil Gaiman

#30. All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Oscar Wilde

#31. We ... believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

Irving Stone

#32. I finally got to the point where I decided I don't care if it's good art or bad art - it's what I do. I enjoy doing it, and people like it.

Margaret Keane

#33. 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

#34. Money is not the root of all kinds of evil. The love of money is. It's also the root of a lot of bad art.

Michael Gungor

#35. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#36. Well, I'm not defining good and bad art, except, that art that appeals to me or repels me is good. Art that bores me is bad.

Lucien Carr

#37. Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.

Ezra Pound

#38. There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Karen Armstrong

#39. Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.

Sherwood Anderson

#40. It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.

Louis Auchincloss

#41. Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

Kevin Wilson

#42. Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

Oscar Wilde

#43. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.

Anthony Marais

#44. The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.

C.S. Lewis

#45. Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.

Don Paterson

#46. Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

C.S. Lewis

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

Thomas Hoving

#48. I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.

Damien Hirst

#49. The damnable thing about bad art is that the insincerity which lies at its roots is not perceived by the artist himself.

Quentin Bell

#50. The problem is we're looking for something that doesn't exist. We're looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art. Art is never about its content. It's about its scaffolding.

Chris Abani

#51. Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

Clive James

#52. I cannot tell good art from bad art. I have no eye for it.

Seth MacFarlane

#53. When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.

Tom Robbins

#54. Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

Hermann Broch

#55. The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Hatchery fish have the same colours, but they always seem muted like bad reproductions of great art.

Bill Barich

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

Don DeLillo

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.

Salvador Dali

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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