Artist Quotes

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

The realistic value of a work is completely independent of its properties in terms of content.

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

Man needs colour to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water.

Two old Bachelors were living in one house; One caught a Muffin, the other caught a Mouse.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.

There was an old man with a beard, who said: 'It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard.

I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle, so all is peace.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.

The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.

Minimal art went nowhere.

In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms - square, cube, line and color - to produce logical systems. Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations. This kept them simple.

I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

I believe that the artist's involvement in the capitalist structure is disadvantageous to the artist and forces him to produce objects in order to live.

I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.

Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.