For every person that can, there are countless people who say they can’t. Every successful person has a critic who thinks that breath is wasted simply talking about him or her. What is to follow here are some of the better insults about artistic people throughout time. It is in no specific order, and my opinion is not represented in any of these quotes, they are merely amusing to read, so I though I would share them with you all.
Architecture
|
| "Any work of Architecture that does not express serenity is a mistake". Luis Barragán "Time" (1980) - (Photo credit: Susleriel) |
An architect is two percent gentlemen and ninety-eight percent renegade car salesman.
-Anonymous
In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.
-Nancy Banks-Smith “The Guardian” (1969)
 |
| "Modern architecture is a flop. There is no question that our cities are uglier today than they were fifty years ago." Phillip Johnson (1968) |
Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they turn down clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.
-Philip Johnson “Esquire” (1980)
 |
| "Perhaps the blank faceless abstract quality of our modern architecture is a reflection of the anxiety we feel before the void, a kind of visual static which emanates from the psyche of us all, as if we do not know which way to go. " Norman Mailer "Cannibals and Christians" |
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozed out the trees, then names the streets after them.Fashion
-Bill Vaughan
(On Miniskirts) never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.
-Sir Cecil Beaton (1969)
 |
"The jean! The jean is the destructor! It is a dictator! It is destroying creativity. The jean must be stopped."
|
 |
| "Saint-Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays." Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel |
Art produces ugly things, which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
-Jean Cocteau
Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.
-Queen Marie of Romania (1938)
 |
| "Princes Di wears more clothes in one day than Gandhi wore in his whole life." Joan Rivers |
A dress has no purpose unless it makes a man want to take it off.
-Francoise Sagan
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.Painting
-Henry David Thoreau
Modern art is like trying to follow the plot in alphabet soup.
-Anonymous
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
-Clement Greenberg
 |
| "How vain painting is, we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don’t admire at all." Blaise Pascal "Pensées" (1669) |
I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.
-William Hogarth (1761)
The more minimal the art the more maximum the explanation.
-Hilton Kramer
 |
| "Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of the birds? People love the night, a flower, everything which surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting… that they must understand." Pablo Picasso |
An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
-John Ruskin
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.
-Lionel Trilling
 |
| I’m glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner. Mark Twain |
Visiting museums bastardizes the personality, just as hobnobbing with the priests makes you lose your faith.
-Maurice Vlaminck
 |
| "An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some good reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them." Andy Warhol |
 |
| "A work of art is useless. So is a flower." Oscar Wilde |
"They couldn’t find the artist, so they hung the picture."Salvador Dali
-Anonymous
 |
| Portrait of Salvador Dali taken in Maurice Hotel Paris (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
"Faced with a virtual complete record of the old phony’s unswerving bathos, it was impossible not to burst out yawing… the uproar of banality numbed the mind. "
-Clive James “Flying Visits” (1984)
"Senor Dali, born delirious, considers it folly to be serious."Vincent van Gogh
-Phyllis McGinley (1960)
"Vincent van Gogh’s mother painted all of his best things. The gamous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by van Gogh’s dealer."Michelangelo
-Roy Blount Jr.
"If Michelangelo had been a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller."
-Rita Mae Brown (1988)
He was a good man but he did not know how to paint.Claude Monet
-El Greco
It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.
-Charivari
A skillful but short-lived decorator.Pablo Picasso
-Edgar Degas (1888)
A Catalan wizard who fools with shapes.
-Bernard Berenson
Picasso kept finding new ways of avoiding maturity.
-Clive James “Flying Visits” (1984)
If I met Picasso in the street I would kick him in the pants.Andy Warhol
-Sir Alfred Munnings “Speech at the royal palace” (1949)
The most famous living artist in America is Andy Warhol, unfortunately.
-Augustine Renoir
Warhol’s art belongs less to the history of painting than to the history of publicity.
-Hilton Kramer
The only genius with an IQ of 60.
-Gore Vidal
Guest Author: The author of this article is Damien S. Wilhelmi. If you enjoyed this information, you can follow me on twitter @JakabokBotch. I am writing on behalf of 15thstreetstudio.com, which is perhaps the best art gallery in Boulder.
Photo Credits go to Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted.
