Quotes About Looking At Art

#1. When you're so drawn to art, to making pictures and looking at art, it's really all you want to think about.

Don Ed Hardy

#2. During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I traveled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#3. The only way to teach focus is to present the eye with opportunities for steady perception - best supplied by the contemplation of art. Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquillity.

Camille Paglia

#4. Looking at art is one way of listening to God.

Wendy Beckett

#5. Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.

Walter Darby Bannard

#6. Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

Chuck Close

#7. Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

Richard P. Feynman

#8. I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

Annabelle Selldorf

#9. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

Lynda Barry

#10. Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

Brian Eno

#11. In bluntest terms, art museums risk being commercial institutions in which art is subsumed by economics and the experience of looking at art becomes a form of consumption.

Amy Whitaker

#12. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

Jeff Koons

#13. He had perfected the art of looking interested, and could grasp in surprise at any and every predictable punchline.

Ian Rankin

#14. I like looking back at art-work or my writing and seeing it in a different perspective...It shows how much one has grown as a creator. Perfection may not exist in reality but I always strive to capture the beauty in whatever I happen to be doing.

Alexander Lloyd Curran

#15. It's art. If you're looking at it, it's working.

Max Gladstone

#16. I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.

Eleanor Catton

#17. The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.

Zoe Kravitz

#18. Redemption in Christ should give the artistically gifted not only a new orientation and a new sense of purpose, but also a new vision of reality, seeing the world through the eyes of faith, looking at the human condition through the eyes of Christ.

John Walford

#19. Being a leader, it's the art of trying to find the balance, the right times with each individual and what they need at that moment. It requires looking outward as opposed to looking inside.

Kobe Bryant

#20. Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

Jerry Saltz

#21. I always knew that I had to direct. That was something I'd wanted to do. Finally, I was just looking at the situation and I said, "I wanna document hip-hop, as an art form, seeing how a lot of people don't take it seriously."

Ice-T

#22. A rude tourist was looking at paintings in a museum. He didn't find anything interesting and turned to the attendant while pointing to a large frame. Tourist: (making an ugly face) Is this what you call art? Attendant: No sir, this is what we call a mirror.

Johnson C. Philip

#23. Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it. It's what you feel.

Shaquille O'Neal

#24. ("It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")

Donna Tartt

#25. Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.

Eugenie Scott

#26. What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again. Really great art regenerates the perception of reality; the reality becomes richer, better or not, just different.

Gabriel Orozco

#27. How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.

Robert Gottlieb

#28. Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one's chest, to sing one's song. So that element is present in all art. It is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it.

George Carlin

#29. I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity.

Albert Oehlen

#30. Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

Henry James

#31. Inside the glittery, swanky cases-the 'modern art' materials that were all the rage at the time, Formica and glass and plastic-was something very unpleasant, very frightening, and looking absolutely real.

Paul Thek

#32. Looking at himself, but wishing he was someone else. Because the posters on the wall, they don't look like him at all.

Jack Johnson

#33. It's about what I know is true. Because I'm looking at this bright red storm of color on a canvas, at all my delicate lines and passionate brushstrokes. I'm looking at something so urgent and true, so far beyond what I thought I was capable of making.

Nina LaCour

#34. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

John Ciardi

#35. Great innovations, powerful interactions and real art are often produced by someone in a state of wonder. Looking around with stars in your eyes and amazement at the tools that are available to you can inspire generosity and creativity and connection

Seth Godin

#36. I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

Virginia Woolf

#37. Originally, I was interested in athletic pursuits like snowboarding, martial arts and surfing. When I went to the Himalayas and met a number of Buddhist monks I was introduced to a new way of looking at life.

Frederick Lenz

#38. Until I was eighteen, I did not know that you could study fashion design or art. I really didn't know. I already had my nose in the art world; I was already looking at things, but I didn't really get it that you could study that because my school was a very different environment.

Raf Simons

#39. People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it's just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they're playing with the same amount of ferocity. It's not to say all jazz is like that.

Damien Chazelle

#40. The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting.

Jennifer Pharr Davis

#41. I had always spoken about the space between the art object and the person looking at it as this dynamic space, which I referred to over and over. So the idea of the space between two things was sort of interesting to me.

Robert Barry

#42. I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Maya Lin

#43. In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.

Andreas Gursky

#44. Art is not an object, but a way of looking at an object.

Elaine Equi

#45. But now, the final feeling ... is one of gratitude that the journey was undertaken. Looking at the past has meant, for the first time, being able to let it go.

Ruth Cracknell

#46. The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.

Kehinde Wiley

#47. That night, stargazing on the deck with Dad, eyes on the sky, he pointed out Orion, Betelgeuse. "It's an art to read the stars, baby."
I never wanted to leave his side-my sure song for so long. Now? His eyes are stone changed. Just looking at them hurts my heart.

Norma Fox Mazer

#48. Whilst the last members were signing it Doctr. Franklin looking towards the Presidents chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun.

James Madison

#49. The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

Siri Hustvedt

#50. It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it.

Peter Heller

#51. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.

John Lanchester

#52. The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.

John Chamberlain

#53. I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.

Peter Greenaway

#54. Oh, is that all you're looking forward to - a break from your studies?" He peered down at her with a knowing smirk.

Lisa Carlisle

#55. As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.

Banksy

#56. You're looking at an actor whose price has just doubled.

Art Carney

#57. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Henry Hazlitt

#58. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.

J.P. Donleavy

#59. I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.

Edgar Wright

#60. It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

Vincent Van Gogh

#61. I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

Damien Hirst

#62. In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

Bill Henson

#63. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Teju Cole

#64. The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.

Theaster Gates

#65. The art of happiness is being content with what you have,' she would say, looking with apparent satisfaction out of the dusty windows at the garden, yellowing like an uncut hayfield in the October sunshine.

Philippa Gregory

#66. Now, I can smile at the stock quality of these friends, these uniforms. these looking-glasses, these sharers. Each is a character lifted straight from literature and yet, life successfully aping art, they are alive, and fulfil their destinies - or act their parts - flawlessly.

Hal Porter

#67. Sometimes you don't get the value of the art or the painting you buy. The value you get from it is on the wall and you're looking at it. It's the same with your car. You're using it, so it goes down in value but you've used it.

Lemar

#68. If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

Vincent Price

#69. When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

Paul Klee

#70. I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

Tom Waits

#71. The act of recording requires you to look at and handle and touch things, so yes - art is more than just looking and recording. It's messy and time consuming and people might fall in love and get hurt.

Laurel Nakadate

#72. And style, by the way, is a very important thing. It is like your signature, your handwriting or it is something that you develop that is your way of presenting yourself and also your way of looking at what art - of how to make art.

Robert Barry

#73. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

Billy Childish

#74. Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.

Dara Horn

#75. When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.

Banksy

#76. You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

Marina Abramovic

#77. Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.

Karl Pilkington

#78. I don't think about myself having any form or style. Although it does tend to be rather realistic; not too stylised at all, it's not as exaggerated as comic art normally is. I try to go for a more realistic looking approach to my art.

Marko Djurdjevic

#79. Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves.

Augusto Boal

#80. He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motercycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.

Michael Thomas Ford

#81. When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith.

Jeffrey Deitch