Leszek Kalakowski

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know we we are.

Wassily Kandinsky

We live in a time full of questions and premonitions and omens – hence full of contradictions

Wassily Kandinsky

The starting point is the study of color and its effect on men.
(Concerning the Spiritual in Art)

Wassily Kandinsky

Art has the power to create a spiritual atmosphere.
(Concerning the Spiritual in Art)

Wassily Kandinsky

Color directly influences the soul.
(Concerning the Spiritual in Art)

John Keats

   'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,' – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.  (Ode on a Grecian Urn)

John Keats

    Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,—
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.   (Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Ellsworth Kelly

In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.

Martin Kemp

That “western art” has a history seems self-evident.  It has existed for over 2 ½ millennia, and has undergone a series of transformations.  At one time it seemed reasonably clear what comprised that history . . . [now there is] a radical questioning of the validity of artistic quality as a criterion, of “western” as the standpoint perspective from which the world is to be viewed, and of history as something that tells the story of inexorable progress. . . There is no one way of telling the story which can claim the highest level of validity.

Anselm Kiefer

It's horrible; you're desperate, but the next day it becomes, sometimes, beautiful.  Because I didn't see what was inside.  Desperation is a material for artists.  
(Talking about his work in New York Times, July 9, 2009)

Roger Kimball

The greatest occupational hazard for an art critic or art historian is to let words come between the viewer and the experience of art - to substitute a verbal encounter for an aesthetic one.  (The Rape of the Masters)

Roger Kimball

The art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art.  For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.  (The New Criterion, July 2007)

Paul Klee

To paint well is simply this: put the right color in the right place. 

Oskar Kokoschka

Expressionism does not live in an ivory tower, it calls upon a fellow being whom it awakens.  (Edvard Munch's Expressionism, College Art Journal, 1953)

Jeff Koons

When I view the world, I don't think of my own work.  I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.  
(New York Times, Feb 28, 2010)

Lawrence M. Krauss

I often tell teachers that the biggest mistake any of them can make is to assume that their students are interested in what they are about to say. Teaching is seduction.

Ernest Kris

Art is not produced in an empty space, no artist is independent of predecessors or models – he, no less than the scientist and the philosopher is part of a specific tradition and works in a structured area
of problems.

Allen Kurzweil

    The viewer paints the picture, the reader writes the book
The glutton gives the tart its taste and not the pastry cook.
(The Grand Complication)