Quotes About Ugly Art

#1. Fashion: a beautiful thing that becomes ugly. Art: an ugly thing that becomes beautiful.

Coco Chanel

#2. I think it's ugly, but I don't know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.

Kurt Vonnegut

#3. There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.

Auguste Rodin

#4. What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

Corin Nemec

#5. On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, 'Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?' and Bull said, 'I like it because it's ugly.

Jack Kerouac

#6. My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly.

Raoul Dufy

#7. People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish ... but that's only if it's done properly.

Banksy

#8. Art should be beautiful, not ugly. It should be uplifting and redemptive. Art reassures us that life is good and that, however bad things may look at the moment, everything works out for the best in the end.

Michael Swanwick

#9. The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Paul Klee

#10. 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

#11. Women from fashion magazines, they hate other women. They like to tell other women they are ugly and often it works. Women's magazines are mostly about the outside and not about the inside. About make-up instead of arts and literature. Its such a shame.

Oliviero Toscani

#12. I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.

Max Ernst

#13. Ah, March! we know thou art Kind-hearted,
spite of ugly looks and threats,
And, out of sight, art nursing April's violets!

Helen Hunt Jackson

#14. All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Clement Greenberg

#15. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

Jean Baudrillard

#16. Art is a critical component in a well-rounded education. Art is the level playing field - no matter how rich or poor, tall or short, pretty or ugly to the bone, if you can draw, you can find personal fulfillment and build self-confidence. Art is the highest achievement of mankind.

Lynda Resnick

#17. The business of art is to enlarge and correct the heart and to lift our ideals out of the ugly and the mean through love of the ideal ... The business of art is to appeal to the soul.

Florence Earle Coates

#18. I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.

Charlotte Eriksson

#19. The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography.

Maggie Ybarra

#20. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.

Natasha Pulley

#21. The art world is now a fashion industry, led by its Whitney Biennial 'nose for the new look.' But nobody, it seems, has the guts or the brains to blow the necessary whistle and holler, 'Hold on guys! What the hell is this ugly bit of business?

Abe Ajay

#22. I would prefer to have a more appealing job. If I could still change careers, I would prefer it. This unfortunate art is made for long beards and ugly faces rather than for a relatively well-endowed woman.

Camille Claudel

#23. Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

Gustave Flaubert

#24. Death is my art form--when I fight, I'm a ballerina. Graceful. Chi lacks my grace, but makes up for it in energy and enthusiasm. His fighting style is like breakdancing--strong and frenetic with some really sweet moves. Jo's is . . .the Macarena. Ugly but gets the job done.

Eliza Crewe

#25. Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

David Bailey

#26. I just do art because I'm ugly and there's nothing else for me to do.

Andy Warhol

#27. Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.

Theophile Gautier

#28. Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Mona Simpson

#29. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Fernando Pessoa

#30. Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it's ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you.

Lara Adrian

#31. The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.

Jules De Goncourt

#32. Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art.

Mike Curran

#33. Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Jean Cocteau

#34. Hey ugly folks, go get some cyanide and die.

Frank Zappa

#35. How can you say that modern art is ugly,when you worship the Lord in a building painted like this?

Hans Rookmaaker

#36. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

Tennessee Williams

#37. The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea ... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Ad Reinhardt

#38. The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#39. By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

William Dean Howells

#40. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Oscar Wilde

#41. [David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.

Janet Malcolm

#42. I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jerry Saltz

#43. Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin ... wickedness has made you ugly.

George MacDonald

#44. It's ugly, but is it art?

Randall Jarrell

#45. 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

#46. The last void stone I'd worn was a beautiful black stone caught in vines of copper and silver. It looked like a necklace, a piece of art, really. This thing was spud-ugly.

Devon Monk

#47. My thesis in terms of all my art is finding the beauty in the ugly truth. Just find the beauty in realism and what's there.

Nikki Jean

#48. Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Jerry Saltz

#49. I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

Kiki Smith

#50. Create something. Create something ugly. Create something beautiful. I don't care what it is. Create it.

Jill Telford

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of ... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.

Victor Hugo