“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”
“It is impossible to legislate taste, and if it were possible, it would be repugnant. There are no Commandments in art and no easy axioms for art appreciation. ‘Do I like this?’ is the question anyone should ask themselves at the moment of confrontation with the picture. But if ‘yes’, why ‘yes’? and if ‘no’, why ‘no’? The obvious direct emotional response is never simple, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ has nothing at all to do with the picture in its own right. ‘I don’t understand this poem’, ‘I never listen to classical music’, ‘I don’t like this picture,’ are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something about the speaker.”
“That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and livelihood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making, who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up, flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant. This is not arrogance; of course they can absorb in a few moments, and without any effort, the sum of the artist and the art.”
“If the obvious and direct emotional response is to have any meaning, the question ‘Do I like this?’ will have to be the opening question and not the final judgement. An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination of the piece of work. This is far to the work and it will help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice, opinion, anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our feelings but right to test them too. If they are what we say they are, they will stand the test, if not, we will at least be insincere. But here we come back to the first hurdle of art, and it is a high one; it shows us up.”
“When you say ‘This work has nothing to do with me’. When you say ‘This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/elitist etc.’, you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong because work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are.”
“A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?”