Andy Warhol
(1928-1987)

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

Andy Warhol

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

I like money on the wall.  Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting, I think you shoud take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall.  Then, when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.

Andy Warhol

Don't read your reviews.  Weigh them.

Andy Warhol

Art is anything you can get away with. (quoting Marshal McLuhan)

Alan Watts

Museums are places where art goes to die.

Evelyn Waugh

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct, and to refrain from destruction.

Ai Wei Wei

see Quotations A

Simone Weil
(1909-1943)

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct. . .  and to refrain from destruction.

Edward Weston
(1886-1958)

No painter or sculptor can be wholly abstract.  We cannot imagine forms not already existing in nature, - we know nothing else. . . .I have proved, through photography, that Nature has all the "abstract" (simplified) forms Brancusi or any other artist can imagine.  With my camera I go direct to Brancusi's source.  I find ready to use, select and isolate, what he has to "create."  [1932 letter to Ansel Adams]

Albert North Whitehead
(1861-1947)

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of pattern. [Dialogues, 1954]

Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)

No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did he would cease to be an artist.

Oscar Wilde

There was no fog in London until Whistler started painting it.

Oscar Wilde

God and other artists are always a little obscure.

Oscar Wilde

It is not art that imitates life, but life that imitates art.

Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense form of individualism that the world has known.
[The Soul of Man Under Socialism]

Oscar Wilde

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblence to the thing it criticizes.  The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.  [1890]

Oscar Wilde

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.  The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.  It is not he who is revealed by the painter, it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.  [The Picture of Dorian Gray]

Oscar Wilde

All art is quite useless.  [Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray]

David Wilson

Any man who pretends to be happy about a day in a shopping mall - like a man who agrees to go on a date to an art gallery - is simply hoping it will lead to sex.  [This Age We're Living In, 2007]

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Good taste had its beginnings under a Greek sky.

Wittgenstein

The limits of my language are the limits of my world

William Wordsworth

TPictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Albert Wolff

They [Impressionists] take a canvas, colors, and brushes, place a few random touches, and sign the result.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.