Steve Martin Art Quotations

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

I'm not a human being. I'm despicable and disgusting - but that's where the money is.

You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.

I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.

The presence of excessive wealth puts an unnatural spin on the appreciation of art.

The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.

No art comes from the conscious mind.