Thoughts on Art
We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
-Pablo Picasso
Art is about paying attention.
-Laurie Anderson
Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method.
-Richard Serra
If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn't make it. It was almost like it was made already...the challenge is more about trying to make what you can't think of.
-Cindy Sherman
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
-Francis Bacon
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
-Robert Motherwell
The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his [her] contribution to the creative act.
-Marcel Duchamp
It's easy to be an artist in your head. Do more.
-David Salle
Art is the only way to run away, without leaving home.
-Twyla Tharp
I am concerned with who speaks and who is silent and with work that addresses the material conditions and social relations that comprise what we call life.
-Barbara Kruger
Art= Man [Woman]= Creativity= Freedom. Every man [woman] is creative and hence he [she] is free. Freedom and creativity make him [her] fundamentally able to determine, to form and to change. This is true both in the realm of art- whose task is to create awareness of such possibilities- and in society.
-Joseph Beuys
We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust
Art isn't everything, it's just about everything.
-Gertrude Stein
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
-Oscar Wilde
Make a work look like play.
-Cindy Sherman
Learn to recognize when you need to know something.
-Bruce Nauman
For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
-Rudyard Kipling
Try to keep yourself off balance because the process allows for a certain amount of discovery.
-Benny Andrews
Ask yourself a problem where you can't turn to someone else.
-Chuck Close
The viewer becomes more involved as the art becomes more of a puzzle.
-Will Insley
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
-Barbara Kruger
Art comes from not believing in what is going on in this world.
-Nancy Spero
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
-Thomas Merton
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.
-Pablo Picasso
To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
-Georgia O'Keefe
The meanings of things aren't stable. Anything can mean almost anything.
-Jasper Johns
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
-Damien Hirst
Education for creativity is nothing short of education for living.
-Erich Fromm
I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like, really means, I don't know anything about art, but I like what I know.
-Anonymous
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
-Charlie Chaplin
Painting...is one of the surest, most direct forms of communication known to man.
-Stuart Davis
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
-Robert Smithson
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
The qualities that one needs to be a good goalkeeper are exactly the same as to be a good sculptor. In both professions one should have a good relationship with time and space.
-Eduardo Chillida
One eye sees, the other feels.
-Paul Klee
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
-Andy Warhol
I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out of the real world.
-Robert Rauschenberg