Denis Dutton Quotes

Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.

Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.

Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance.

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.