function fortune(all) { quotes = new Array(); quotes[0]="An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he -- for some reason -- thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Andy Warhol"; quotes[1]="I am only a public clown -- a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

supposedly Pablo Picasso

A witty Italian summed it up in a burlesque interview with Picasso, who is here supposed to be speaking...Picasso's enemies seized upon the alleged interview with delight and at once pronounced it to be genuine. It has been translated, with variations, into many languages, and it keeps reappearing, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: only the other day I was sent an English version from a parish magazine in which it illustrated the text \"Be ye perfect.\"

Patrick O'Brian"; quotes[2]="There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso"; quotes[3]="What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Don DeLillo"; quotes[4]="Good art is a very mysterious and complicated thing; it can and should have everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is there to take us beyond language. We agonize over what is good and not so good because we value art so much. We have strong opinions about it and we want to externalize those opinions. We can't do it. All we can do is enjoy the art we like, point to it, tell others about it, look for more and hope it keeps on being made.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[5]="Writing about art is only useful when it leads into the experience of art.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[6]="So, take a hard look at these paintings. Come back in a few days and look again. Is this great art or 20 square feet of wasted paint? I've said what I think; size them up and see what you think. More than that we can't do.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[7]="Why talk when you can paint?

Milton Avery"; quotes[8]="Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.

Richard R. Powell"; quotes[9]="The marketplace bustles, changes, and is lost in history. But art, good art, is as persistent as it is fragile.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[10]="I believe that when you go into a gallery or a museum, the most powerful pieces are the ones that don't have the words in the corner that distract you from the larger piece.

Maynard James Keenan"; quotes[11]="You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London"; quotes[12]="Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, \"Now, do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?\" But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision. The fact of the matter is, since the beginning of time, you could buy a Picasso and change the colors. That's trivial. But you don't because you're buying a piece of Picasso's fucking soul. That's the definition of art: Art is one person's ego trip.

Penn Jillette"; quotes[13]="A great work of art has the power to blow you over and to do it unexpectedly.

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[14]="1 inch of white on each side as per Clem

Morris Louis"; quotes[15]="Art has no words. Words have nothing to do with art, absolutely nothing. That's the wonderful thing about it, the magic of it.

Alexandre Iolas"; quotes[16]="I got rid of the desire to possess: seeing is reward enough for me now.

Tibor de Nagy"; quotes[17]="The forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

David Halberstam"; quotes[18]="Art makes you reinvent the wheel with regularity. If you don't, art slips away.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[19]="I don't know how the art world gets away with it, it's not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, \"If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.\"

Banksy"; quotes[20]="Some day, everything that we love and cherish will be swallowed up by Procter & Gamble, digested, and then pushed out into convenient, individually packaged, sanitized, deodorized, noncomedogenic disposable wipes. All that is spontaneous and real in the world will be captured on a camera phone, thrown onto YouTube, blogged about by half of humanity, discussed by hair-sprayed TV mouthpieces, denounced by enraged special-interest groups, and legislated against, explicitly, to prevent exposing the general public to anything unguarded or unplanned or not yet vetted by a phalanx of market researchers and product-development specialists.

Heather Havrilesky"; quotes[21]="It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them...and that is what poetry, and painting, and literature, and filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that.

Werner Herzog"; quotes[22]="Pop culture has become a self-propelling engine that endlessly consumes and recycles its own waste products, increasingly unconscious of anything that predates its own predominance.

Andrew O'Hehir"; quotes[23]="In the end there is only love.

Pablo Picasso"; quotes[24]="Critic: It is true that these pictures do not displease my eye; but since I do not understand them, I cannot like them.
Sage: What did you have for lunch?
Critic: Oysters.
Sage: Do you like oysters?
Critic: Passionately.
Sage: Do you understand oysters?

Gómez de la Serna"; quotes[25]="Nothing is so cheerful as the urge to commit art.

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[26]="So is skill intrinsic to art? Yes, in the way that water is intrinsic to swimming. Swimming, whether the dog paddle or the butterfly, is something that happens because of water. Art is something that happens because of skill. Does more water mean better swimming? Not after you have enough of it. What's enough? It depends on what you think of as a good swim.

Franklin Einspruch"; quotes[27]="Until the advent of reality TV talent shows like American Idol, most of us existed in blissful ignorance of the sheer number of completely untalented people who remain convinced that they are destined for stardom.

Laura Miller"; quotes[28]="To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Igor Stravinsky"; quotes[29]="As an experienced and clever film critic, I even know how to write fashionable praise about the film -- how to interpret the director's message, how to show I am bright enough to understand his subtleties. I can even rationalize his extremes and explain how only philistines will dislike the work. I know how to write that kind of review, but damn it all, I would be reviewing the movie's style and ignoring its lost soul.

Roger Ebert"; quotes[30]="Everything in the current world of art and design seems to want to be what it is not, or at least not what it used to be. Contemporary craft wants to be thought of as art. Art, disdaining the fuss and preciousness of craft, wants to be conceptual. Photography wants to be painterly and painting wants to be photographic. Architecture wants so much to be sculpture that it shoulders actual sculpture aside. Sculpture, meanwhile, maybe in self-defense, wants to be about the creation of sites -- it wants to be architecture. Furniture, like other fields of design, is restive with its niche and pushing against the limits of genre. You could look at this churning of old categories as a symptom of ferment, or as a sign of confusion, or both.

Glenn Gordon"; quotes[31]="On the walls of the room where his body was laid out, all his last canvases were hung making a sort of halo for him and the brilliance of the genius that radiated from them made this death even more painful for us artists who were there. The coffin was...surrounded with masses of flowers, the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was, you will remember, his favorite color, the symbol of the light that he dreamed of being in people's hearts as well as in works of art. Near him also on the floor in front of his coffin were his easel, his folding stool and his brushes. Many people arrived, mainly artists, among whom I recognized Lucien Pissarro and Lauzet...also some local people who had known him a little, seen him once or twice and who liked him because he was so good-hearted, so human.... I looked at the studies; a very beautiful and sad one based on Delacroix's La vierge et Jésus. Convicts walking in a circle surrounded by high prison walls, a canvas inspired by Doré of a terrifying ferocity and which is also symbolic of his end. Wasn't life like that for him, a high prison like this with such high walls -- so high... and these people walking endlessly round the pit, weren't they the poor artists, the poor damned souls walking past under the whip of Destiny?

Émile Bernard"; quotes[32]="Because here is the thing. I did acid at age 16. So now you know. I don't recommend it. It left me crippled in certain ways. But I saw the whole damn thing in a flash. I knew then how it's all connected and buzzing. That never left me. I am in no doubt about the fundamentals: This thing we are living in is indeed an engine of massively complex figurations and energy, and we are indeed simply flashes, moments, and we are indeed hooked up to the big machine. There's no doubt of this in my mind: I have glimpsed this. I have glimpsed this thing that yogis glimpse and Huxley glimpsed. Did it fix me? No. Glimpsing it didn't fix me. I still went on to feel the full complement of human anxiety and pride and secretiveness and addiction and compulsion. But when I was ready, I had this reservoir of early mystical experience to fall back on. I knew that if I could work backward from the manifestations of my anxiety, backward from my many compulsions, backward from booze and speed and cruelty and ego and cocaine and power and secretiveness, backward from pride, if I could sit on the knife edge of the moment and not move forward into more distractions but stay with the phenomenon, if I could sit in that raging fire long enough just breathing and letting the chaos wash over me, if I could stay in the buzzing of hornets and the disintegration of the ego, if I could just sit there long enough, I could get to know all my fears and I could stop reaching for relief and distraction. I could just sit with it.

Cary Tennis"; quotes[33]="Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?

Roger Ebert"; quotes[34]="Anyone who is not humbling himself to the demands of his discipline is littering.

Franklin Einspruch"; quotes[35]="Be a good craftsman. It won't stop you from being a genius.

Auguste Renoir"; quotes[36]="You come before nature with theories. Nature throws them to the ground.

Auguste Renoir"; quotes[37]="What is to be done about these literary people who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Auguste Renoir"; quotes[38]="When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.

Pauline Kael"; quotes[39]="It was fun watching the applecart being upset, but now where do we go for apples?

Paul Schrader"; quotes[40]="Going for the best is not a matter of taking part in some made-up cultural hierarchy, it is the urgent search for what is truly valuable anywhere and everywhere.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[41]="The world is not cyclical, not eternal or immutable, but endlessly transforms itself, and never goes back, and we can assist with that transformation.

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet"; quotes[42]="He who has the bullet no longer needs poetry. The bullet is poetry.

Arnon Grunberg"; quotes[43]="Always make it easier, and when it gets easier still, trust it.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[44]="Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together.

Alan Moore"; quotes[45]="He had so much to say but more to show and ain't that true of life?

Dar Williams, "Mark Rothko's Song""; quotes[46]="I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Roger Ebert"; quotes[47]="Il faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires.

Jean-Luc Godard"; quotes[48]="I once joked with a Brit writer at the Art Basel Miami Beach solstice that I could teach 20th-century art history in four words: "Duchamp won, Picasso lost."

James Croak"; quotes[49]="I've been doing this for thirty-one years. Maybe after thirty-one years -- if I'm not dead -- I'll come find you and see if you are just as good.

Chef Xavier Mayonove"; quotes[50]="It's like great sex or great food -- I mean, it's all a variation on the orgasm, isn't it? All these things are types of joy. You don't have to be embarrassed by it.

Horace "Woody" Brock"; quotes[51]="No declaration regarding my artwork will withstand scrutiny when compared against the work itself, and little that I say about myself can be surely trusted.

Rob Willms"; quotes[52]="If you can't make it good, make it big, if you can't make it big, make it red.

Audrey Flack"; quotes[53]="Words of encouragement ring longer and louder than the dull thud of your constant negative and condescending words.

"Perfecta""; quotes[54]="Since I make and sell 1,000 paintings a year, I routinely sell 83.3 paintings a month. Out of this selling routine I find great Zen-like inspiration.

Mark Kostabi"; quotes[55]="You have a chance to get what you want if you go out and work for it. But you must really work, not just talk about it.

Georgia O'Keeffe"; quotes[56]="Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.

Oscar Wilde"; quotes[57]="If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

Oscar Wilde"; quotes[58]="In the art system, celebrity has a place but no one knows where it should be. It would be grotesque to give it top place but unrealistic to say it's at the bottom -- a long way below integrity, say. Or known ability to read Lacan in the original French.

Matthew Collings"; quotes[59]="An artist doesn't really exist unless they're having exhibitions in a gallery. And an exhibition never happened unless it's been covered by an art magazine. Ad space is taken out in the magazines to advertise the shows. And to keep the general communication system going. The system is based on the idea that the magazines will cover the shows. It's not a direct financial relationship, where the reviews are actually paid for. But it is nearly. On the other hand, it's a system that seems to work quite well.

Matthew Collings"; quotes[60]="Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.

Theodore Dalrymple"; quotes[61]="For many years, I have told students, "Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it."

Mark C. Taylor"; quotes[62]="Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bernard Berenson"; quotes[63]="So. Sometimes I'm busy. Sometimes I miss my deadlines. Sometimes the well is dry. That's life, kids. It's also Art. You can have it good, but you may not have it Tursday.

Harlan Ellison"; quotes[64]="And an intensely quiet blond girl, a math whiz, who, with no reluctance, sat down at the piano when I asked her if she played piano, squared her shoulders and played the exquisite Chopin Prelude No. 2 in A minor, the notes of the slow movement like raindrops on birch leaves, smoke drifting by, an anguished old man pacing in the grass, and played it so beautifully it transformed the entire evening.

Transformation is no easy trick: It's what art promises and usually doesn't deliver. But she did. It was a difficult piece, and what she showed us was the intense poetry underneath her calm Lutheran exterior. She borrowed Chopin's passion and made it her own, an astonishment, and then she stood up awkwardly and we all clapped and whooped. It was so much more than what we deserved to hear, which is true of art, a lavish gift of the heart that shames pretense by its outrageous generosity.

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[65]="Ideas have enormous value to art, but they have zero value as art.

Franklin Einspruch"; quotes[66]="Practice does not make perfection, but it makes improvement.

Roger Ebert"; quotes[67]="The way that one serves is to serve art first. The way you serve art is by being true to yourself.

Robert Colescott"; quotes[68]="Defensless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

from "1st September 1939" by W.H. Auden"; quotes[69]="For me, walking through Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Rothko, and Hofmann and into Johns and Rauschenberg is like walking out of the rainforest and into Rainforest Cafe. I do not think it is a step backward but a step toward cynicism.

Lou Gagnon"; quotes[70]="Late afternoon, after all the students tucked their black portfolio folders away, their chins pointed this way, curious to see what this big-mouthed Asian girl with an American accent has to show. I looked at my hands. "...I don't mean to be difficult." Then continued, "but I have nothing to show you. I left my works." And went on, "I am not an artist, and I don't know why we make art. For decoration? To sell? For the class? To make ourselves happy? To change the world? What does it mean?"

After a brief pause, someone asked, "Then why are you at an art academy?"

Ayala Fillette"; quotes[71]="People looking for explanations often annoy those who think they have already found one.

"Tom O'Bedlam""; quotes[72]="Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

Mark Twain"; quotes[73]="Fulfilling your duties, where does that land you? Into jealousy, upsets, persecution. Is that the way to get on? Butter people up, good God, butter them up, watch the great, study their tastes, fall in with their whims, pander to their vices, approve of their injustices. That's the secret.

Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew"; quotes[74]="What am I in the eyes of most people -- a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person -- somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then -- even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love despite everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

Vincent van Gogh"; quotes[75]="There is no use in waiting passively to die.

Roger Ebert"; quotes[76]="If you're 40 and have three whiny children, 25 looks awfully good. But late last night I hiked around Chelsea and the cool life looked thin to me, the sorrows of intoxication evident everywhere, people whose big night out turned out too small, people with people they were wanting to not be with right now, the lonely late-night walkers like me.

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[77]="The art artists do is much more a product of their environment than most care to admit. It almost seems a mistake to say that artists are the masters of their art. Individual talent and discipline are necessary conditions for great art, but hardly seem sufficient. From the time of the cave painters, you had to be painting in the right cave to make it to the level of "greatness". Those who painted in the Right Cave kicked the butts of those who painted in the wrong ones, that's for sure. They did it without even knowing what was going on in the other caves. I suppose that might be a lesson for anyone who spends a lot of effort breaking wind over the bad art of today.

John Link"; quotes[78]="Though I confesse it were more proper for mee, To be doing what I say, then writing what I knowe.

Captain John Smith"; quotes[79]="First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi"; quotes[80]="To understand a work of art, it must be seen and perceived, not worded. Words can be used to place art historically, to set it in social context, to describe the movements, to relate it to other works, to state individual preferences, and to set the scene all around it. But the actual understanding of a work of art only comes through the process by which it was created -- and that was by perception.

David Smith"; quotes[81]="In art you never hit what you're aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.

Robert Kulicke"; quotes[82]="Innovation, after a point, is toxic; it destroys conventions, and solid working conventions are necessary to art and to all human achievement.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[83]="Emmet Cole: Finally, when you survey the artistic landscape and consider the future, do you feel despair or hope?

Donald Kuspit: Neither despair nor hope, but only the ironic detachment of a participant observer with certain unpopular values."; quotes[84]="You can't go through life without making some people angry: keep that in mind and you'll save yourself a lot of misery. Even though you practice the Golden Rule with a vengeance, you cannot be so kind and gentle as to avoid giving offense. So when people hiss at you, nod and smile and wish them a good day.

Somewhere, someone is furious at the Dalai Lama. Probably there were people in Calcutta who thought Mother Teresa was a showboat. Back in 000 A.D., some people looked at the Infant Jesus and said, "What's with the ring of light around his head? Why should we capitalize his pronouns? The little bugger loads his pants same as any other kid."

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[85]="There is always lesser art and always will be, but the stuff in these shows discourages one for what it says about the people making art, buying it, selling it, talking about it. It is so damn low level, in a purely human way, so shabby, shoddy and sleazy that you feel like taking a shower afterwards. These are degenerate mentalities plaguing one of our highest callings. They should be doing something else, something useful, and let well-intentioned people who know what they are doing do the thing.

Walter Darby Bannard"; quotes[86]="You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit, and Emerson tossed off little bons mots that have been leading people astray ever since. "To be great is to be misunderstood," for example. This tiny gem of self-pity has given license to a million arrogant and unlovable people to imagine that their unpopularity somehow was proof of their greatness.

Garrison Keillor"; quotes[87]="People need beauty. They need the sense of being at home in their world, and being in communication with other souls. In so many areas of modern life -- in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature -- beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud and insolent gestures of people who want to seize our attention but to give nothing in return for it.

Roger Scruton"; quotes[88]="The good thing about a painting is that it discreetly and silently outlasts moronic comments. It even outlasts the painter.

Luis"; quotes[89]="Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.

Conan O'Brien"; quotes[90]="At the same time, the longer the art world defers real criticism, which is neither rejection nor praise, the more it can pride itself on being open-minded and understanding.

John Yau"; quotes[91]="I don't claim to be unbiased. However, my prejudices are amazingly well-informed.

Cecil Adams"; quotes[92]="I was about 18 when I took my first painting class. I was told I needed to find something to paint about. That tripped me up because I kept trying to find "something" and I didn't understand "about". My first painting was of a pair of Mardi Gras beads and sunglasses. It felt pretty empty at the time, but I was 18 and that's who I was. I kept painting and I kept looking for something to paint about. It took me awhile to realize that that the constant searching was not just part of the work, but that it was the work. 25-plus years later, I'm still searching. Life happens. The process of painting is an ongoing narrative. Not only within each painting, but in the bigger picture (no pun intended). Sometimes it's lame, sometimes its a failure. Sometimes it's shallow. Sometimes it's beautiful and funny, or tries to be heroic, and sometimes it's sad and painful. I have no idea. That's about as authentic as it's going to get for me.

Mary Addison Hackett"; quotes[93]="Your motto: Be bold, be free, be truthful.

Barbara Ueland"; quotes[94]="Childishness, fake emoting, and dumb ideas standing for ideas generally characterize the contemporary and precontemporary administrative-art scenes, both mainlining into accessibility at all costs. Individual artists of today may be sensitive and intellectually advanced, but anything they have to offer will be processed by a scene devoted to solemnity and trivia.

Matthew Collings"; quotes[95]="It is not important to be "right" or "wrong." It is important to know why you hold an opinion, understand how it emerged from the universe of all your opinions, and help others to form their own opinions. There is no correct answer. There is simply the correct process. "An unexamined life is not worth living."

Roger Ebert"; if(all) { for(var i in quotes) { document.write('

'+quotes[i]+'

'); } } else { /* calculate a random index */ index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length); /* display the quotation */ document.write('

'+quotes[index]+'
Quote '+(index+1)+' out of '+(quotes.length)+'. See the full set.

'); } }