A Quote by Natalie Clifford Barney

If only art were as rare as good taste.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Quote Topics

Art Good Good Taste Only Rare Taste Were

Quote Author

Natalie Clifford Barney
American - Novelist
October 31, 1876 - February 2, 1972

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

Marcel Duchamp

Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.

Paul Cezanne

Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.

François-René de Chateaubriand

[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Susan Sontag

One often reads about the art of conversation-how it's dying or what's needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn't you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis [rare bird] is a good listener.

Malcolm Forbes

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.

Ilka Chase

During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste.

Ernst Gombrich

Italian style is a natural attitude. It is about a life of good taste. It doesn't have to be expensive. Simple but with good taste. Luxury is possible to buy. Good taste is not.

Diego Della Valle

I realized that I wasn't naturally born to good taste. I understand what it is, but I am happy to wear bright colors. I do have a few items of black clothing, but I think good taste and doing the same thing over and over again is what the whole art world has become.

Jim Shaw

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.