Most Pretentious Art Quotes

#1. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them.

David Foster Wallace

#2. A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.

Christy Leigh Stewart

#3. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Neil Farber

#4. I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

Lou Reed

#5. It's the work itself that's important to me.' Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it's true?

Emily St. John Mandel

#6. I thought she'd make some comment about the bloodthirsty gods chasing us, but when she finally found her voice, she said, "That boy kissed you!"
Leave it to Liz to have her priorities straight.

Rick Riordan

#7. Fierce language and pretentious advances are signs that the enemy is about to retreat.

Sun Tzu

#8. Winning is the most important. Everything is consequence of that.

Ayrton Senna

#9. I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

Daymond John

#10. I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

Pamela Hanson

#11. The heaven and earth afford me no shelter at all; I'm glad, unreal are body and soul. Welcome thy weapon, O warrior of Yuen! Thy trusty steel, That flashes lightning, cuts the wind of Spring, I feel.

Alan W. Watts

#12. I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#13. So far we still don't know whether angels are ethereal beings of light without substance or if they take a solid human form with real wings which actually enable them to fly.

Malcolm Godwin

#14. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Annie Dillard

#15. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

Rainn Wilson

#16. You have crossbows: Shoot early; shoot often.

Janet Morris

#17. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

Steven Pinker

#18. I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.

Nate Lowman

#19. Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

Takashi Murakami

#20. I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.

Sean Maguire

#21. There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

Andy Milonakis

#22. If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings.

Thomas Sowell

#23. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

Michael Light

#24. I remember growing up, saying you're an artist it sounds pretentious but now it's one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.

Marilyn Manson

#25. The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.

Banksy

#26. But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.

Robin Hobb

#27. In painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure - that doesn't deter me in the least.

Grace Hartigan

#28. My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.

Martin Jacques