Quotes About Subjectivity

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

It's the viewer that makes the work.

My work shows the beauty in so many different kinds of people because I never photograph anyone who I don't think is beautiful. I never take an intentionally mean picture.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way a viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

The person viewing your work has no idea what the scene really looked like, nor do they care.

To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

I think people like Steve Vai are so boring.

I can never look at anything I do subjectively - whether it's a Stone Sour record or a Slipknot record, I can never really have my own opinion of it, 'cos in my opinion it's all crap.

When the assessment of goalkeepers is made by people who have never actually stood there in a game and experienced it, then it's hard to take it without a large pinch of salt.

I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don't want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.

Everyone's story is different, and we can't really be inside them.

Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

Beauty is that little something that fills the whole world, and is contained neither in a single straight nose, a long eyelash, nor a blue mountain. Some see it in a leg of mutton, others in a compound fracture; and to expect others to accept one's own definition of it is as absurd as to expect all humanity to use the same toilet-brush.