Bad Art Quotes

You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it. ~ John Lamb Lash

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

The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words "Holy Spirit" printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with "A bread crumb and a fish" instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it's actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is. ~ Jefferson Bethke

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

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

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

Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all. It is good to care - in any dimension. More Americans put their caring into baseball than into anything else I can think of - and most put at least a little of it there. Baseball can be trusted, as great art can, and bad art can't. ~ William, Saroyan

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

Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art. ~ Sherwood Anderson

In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

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

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

As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention. ~ Chris Kraus

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

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract. ~ Ian McEwan

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. ~ Damien Hirst

Bad art has the power to deform a people just as good art generates new reflection, growth, vision, and hope. ~ Michel O'Brien

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

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

In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art. ~ V.S. Pritchett

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

Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

When I was a child, my artist mom told me that there was no such thing as bad art. I know now that this was a complete lie. Yet it was a lie I needed to hear. It informed me that the goal of art was the creative process of discovery, experimentation, and fun. To this day, I cling to this lie as truth - especially when my pictures don't turn out right. ~ Chris Orwig

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

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system. ~ Hermann Broch

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

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

The lover of excellence is prone to being drawn out of himself, erotically almost, in a way that the universalist egalitarian is not. The latter's empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is similar to bad art and mathematical shoelaces, in this regard; it is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time. ~ Don Paterson

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

I absolutely consider fashion a form of art. Of course, there is some fashion that is not art at all - it's utilitarian, made for the purpose of covering up. And there are a lot of people out there who put a lot of effort into looking awful. But there are also people putting the same amount of energy into making bad art. ~ Iris Apfel

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

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two ... But we don't label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances - if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad ... ~ Dave Eggers

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

I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other ... "but in that case," he said, speaking the words as the thought came to him, "all art is love, because all art is about looking closely, isn't it? Looking closely at what's being painted."
"The artist looking closely while he paints, the viewer looking closely at what has been painted. I agree. All true art, yes. Painting, Writing-literature-also. I think it is. And bad art is a failure to observe with complete attention. So, you see why I like the history of art. It's the study of how to observe life with complete attention. It's the history of love. ~ Aidan Chambers

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

...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again. ~ John Hodgman

I cannot tell good art from bad art. I have no eye for it. ~ Seth MacFarlane

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too. ~ William, Saroyan

Bad art was as good as good art. Grammar and spelling were no longer important. To be clean was no better than to be filthy. Good manners were no better than bad. Family life was derided as an outdated bourgeois concept. Criminals deserved as much sympathy as their victims. Many homes and classrooms became disorderly - if there was neither right nor wrong there could be no basis for punishment or reward. Violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media. Thus was sown the wind, and we are now reaping the whirlwind. ~ Norman Tebbit

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

Bad art is from no one to no one. ~ Sarah Manguso

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression. ~ Michael Kimmelman

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

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong. ~ Oscar Wilde

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world. ~ Patti Smith

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

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence. ~ Harold Rosenberg

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

All bad art is the result of good intentions. ~ Oscar Wilde

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

Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in his writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous, and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn characters to cartoons, or treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasons for being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is bad art. Sanity in a writer also involves taste . . . To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have loved someone dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on . . . If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. ~ John Gardner

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

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition. ~ Brigid Brophy

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies. ~ Rollo May

It's not Art. And Art is not Design. ~ Chip Kidd

I don't need someone that sees what's good about me. I need someone that sees the bad and still wants me. ~ Wiz Khalifa

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms. ~ Mika.

I'm bad for you. I told you I will break you and I will. I wish I knew how not to. I can't. I'm sorry. You have to take me like this ... ~ Mercy Cortez

Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

That was the wonderful thing about New York: Years of bad blood could be wiped out with a single gesture of friendliness. ~ Candace Bushnell

You just can't believe how quickly things happen in football and the way life turns. I went from being the bad guy, the worst player who gets all the criticism, to being the player who makes the difference and scores the important goals. ~ Luis Suarez

A song is not a tool for changing a human heart in the way that a wrench is a tool for changing a bolt, but it was the tool I had, and I was the tool the OSP had.
The cansos in "Songs from Underneath" were not really as subtle as a wrench. Their primary trope was the ancient trick of making the viewpoint character a victim of oppression, because people identify passionately with a strong viewpoint character, and there is intense pleasure in identifying with the narrator of a sad story or song. In "Black Beauty" that trick had made people begin to think that beating horses was bad; it was the trope that make privileged white children burn with outrage at "Native Son" and prudes weep over prostitutes in "Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle" and "My Name is Not Bitch." They also received, at no extra cost, the delicious smug superiority of sympathizing with an underdog, unlike their less-enlightened neighbors.
Their primary ~ John Barnes

The eleventh commandment of art: thou shalt not be boring. ~ W.M. Driscoll

I can't say 'why me,' Brady. That's one of the big no-can-do's. Because if I do that now that bad stuff has happened to me, why didn't I say it about all the amazing stuff that happened to me before? ~ Mike Lupica

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. ~ Hermann Hesse

I just finished my 62nd or my 63rd movie here, and you know, I do good ones, I do bad ones, I do big parts, I do small parts, I do cameos - but I've allowed myself a pat on the back, because I realized that I've been working in Hollywood now since 1973. ~ Robert Englund

The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result. ~ John Mason Good

Whenever something bad happens, do not forget to smile. Even if you have to deal with this really arrogant, ruthless tycoon. You never know, sometimes a very rude and arrogant person can be melted with a heartfelt smile. ~ Zainab T. Khan

90% of every art form is garbage - dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on. ~ Patton Oswalt

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. ~ C. G. Jung

Muddling along ... is the great secret to life ... You take the good and the bad and cope as they happen - Gallen in Intrigues ~ Mercedes Lackey

They were not bad men. They had worked hard on behalf of the valley for hundreds of
years. But it is possible, after a while, to develop certain dangerous habits of thought. One is
that, while all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs
organizing, rather than the enterprise. And another is that tranquillity is always a good thing. ~ Terry Pratchett

It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks. ~ Erica Jong

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop. ~ James Joyce

Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. ~ Thomas Frank

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose. ~ Daniel Smith

And despite the fact that the basis of this mathematical way of thinking in art is in reason, its dynamic content is able to launch us on astral flights which soar into unknown and still uncharted regions of the imagination. ~ Max Bill

Art is personal, criticism shouldn't be. ~ Alan Dapre

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: "Over the last twenty years we've lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we've realized they are illusions, that everything is PR." "Everything is PR" has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as "human rights" and "freedom" as a blunder. "Can't you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?" they ask me. I try to protest - but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly's predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learne ~ Peter Pomerantsev

if you sit around thinking about all the bad crap then the world is sure as hell gonna pass you right on by. ~ Jessica Roe

The art schools seem to be trying to turn people out as "professional." But I don't know what the word "professional" means any longer. "Professional" would be somebody who was trying to push painting to a point that nobody else could do as well as he could. That would be my ideal professional. ~ Lawrence Weiner

For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all - immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle. ~ Heraclitus

You learn so much about music from all the people you surround yourself with - good, bad and indifferent. It's extremely hard to be specific. ~ Bill Bruford

My fans are incredible. Don't you dare talk bad about me on my Instagram, because my fans will come out and they will eat you alive. ~ Ashley Graham

I define a 'good person' as somebody who is fully conscious of their own limitations. They know their strengths, but they also know their 'shadow' - they know their weaknesses. In other words, they understand that there is no good without bad. Good and evil are really one, but we have broken them up in our consciousness. We polarize them. ~ John Bradshaw

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully, and with inevitability. Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. Dancing is like dreaming with your feet! ~ Constanze Mozart

That art is best which suggests most. ~ Austin O'Malley

I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly. ~ Robert Barry

The fortress of books. And I think, privately, of the Three Little Pigs. I wonder if we are the big who built his house out of books and words and thoughts. What happens when the Big Bad Wolf arrives there? Does the house hold up? Or does it all fall down? ~ Andrea Cremer