ART HISTORY Quotes

LESS FAMOUS QUOTES ABOUT ART HISTORY

The Bible never identified the Forbidden Fruit as an apple. In it, the fruit is an allegory rather than a specific specimen. Painters in the Middle Ages chose the apple for two reasons. First, it was a common where they painted. Second, the Latin word malum translates to both "apple" and "evil."
This example of visual expression highlights the artist's core responsibility. Studying these historical decisions reveals how visual choices shape our view of reality.
Consider the following quotes about art history:

Alan K. Avery

Art dealer
“60% of what you learn in art school is BS with the exception of art history. Art history is really important because that can help you develop your work. Other than that there is a lot of fluff and there’s a lot of professors trying to teach you to paint like them. It can really harm your work.

Some of the greatest well-known painters did not go to art school. Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t, Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, even Walt Disney you know… didn’t go to art school and look what they did”

David Starkey

"When I Hear the Word ‘Art’, I Reach for my Gun"

The language of the Arts

"Greece and Rome, the foundation of our culture is a slave culture and the entire language of the Arts to the present day (to this room) to what you do to what is behind me, to how it is regarded is conditioned by this fact."

Liberal Arts

"The Romans divided the Arts into two. There are the Arts of free men, the liberal arts that’s where the world comes from. It’s free men as opposed to slaves and these are essentially the literary arts of rhetoric, the analytical arts of logic, the imaginative arts of poetry. These are which were appropriate to gentlemen and the government along with the useful superior arts like medicine and architecture. The rest I’m afraid is not the liberal arts, they are the sordid arts, they are the arts of the craft of slaves"

The Renaissance

"As far as we can tell Giorgio Vasari actually invents the term The Renaissance. He certainly invents the notion of the supremacy of the arts in the ancient Roman world and its rapid collapse beginning with the age of Constantine. (...) What he is concerned to do is to elevate one art above all others: Painting. He emphasizes the antiquity of painting. He does something else which I think is a very important clue to what I’m going to be talking about. He emphasizes that most painters are learning also in those abstracts arts, because painting has got the terrible problem: it involves brushes, it involves pigments, canvas, wood, wet plaster, it’s horrifyingly messy."

No Roman painters are known

"Gentlemen aren’t messy. So you’ve got to put in another little bit: they’ve got to be learned in these abstract as well the mere craftsmanship has got to be illuminated by the greater arts, the liberal arts of philosophy and poetry. (...) Vasary makes extraordinary claims for the reputation of painting in the Roman period (...) These claims are entirely false: we know the names of no Roman painters. There is no evidence of them signed their works. The great bulk of them were slaves. They were decorators."

Fine Art

"French has already set up an Academie des Beaux-arts in 1648: English does not have the term Fine Art until the 1760s. The earliest use of the term artist to mean a painter is 1747. It’s yesterday."

Royal academy

"Now that brings us neatly to the moment at which painting steps fully under the stage in England as an acknowledged distinguished profession for which you could be a gentleman you could be regarded as an intellectual, that you could be a friend of royalty, that you could be altogether an okay person you would have to dinner and the key figure in all of this, of course, is the first president of the Royal Academy, president in 1768."

being knighted artist

"Just the moment you’ve got Fine Art into the language, who is Joshua Reynolds, knighted in 1769: It is an idea that subsists only in the mind, the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it, it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart and which he dies at the last without imparting ie art is conceptual”

Marcel Duchamp

“In his seventies, Marcel Duchamp’s become what in youth he most despised, he’s become an artist and he’s become an artist whose works are fake. Every single one of those you see in the Tate or in MoMA is an industrially fake made in Milan in 1964.”

✒ David Starkey - The Goldsmiths' Company Lecture on YouTube

Elise Bell

Writer
"You are a 50-year-old painter named Paul Gauguin and your newlywed wife is 13 years old. Now you know how I felt when I found out that my favorite painter was actually a colonialist pedophile"

"I'm talking about racism, colonialism, homophobia, sexism, war, the Holocaust that is why art history is important: because it demands that we look at paintings like this, that we stir our uncomfortable toxic beautiful history right in the eye and that we critique it. That is why our history is important. Art history is our history so let's reclaim it"

✒ Elise Bell, writer & founder of tabloidarthistory.com
YouTube - “Where Art Thou?”