Best 32 quotes in «contemporary art quotes» category

At first, I thought I would use photography and the collage and montage possibilities of Photoshop strictly for visualization in preparation for my paintings. But after I experimented with Photoshop and digital photography, I soon discovered new possibilities and found exciting new ways of presenting ideas. I soon found that I was more interested in pure image-making than I was in actually painting the images. Digital Camera, 2017

discovered is that I’m an image maker, and I don’t care how its made—whether it’s through painting or photography or drawing—I just want to create images.

Fascinated by the great symbols of the collective history, I use them as an alphabet to communicate.

Contemporary Art is nothing but Speculation.

If we do everything that’s comfortable, then what we come up with is just kind of a boring, comfortable result.

I developed a thirst for great art, but it wasn’t until I was 20 that I finally visited my first museum, the Prado in Madrid. There, in 1968, my interest was caught by the paintings of Luis de Morales, a 16th-century artist from the harsh Extremadura region of Spain. Morales was a Mannerist, like El Greco or Parmigianino, who painted very graceful figures with long necks and limbs. He did a magnificently smooth sfumato modelling. But the effect that impressed me the most was a fine line that he applied around all of his figures. He didn’t need those illustrative lines, but they really made his figures ‘pop’ off the background.

I discovered is that I’m an image maker, and I don’t care how its made—whether it’s through painting or photography or drawing—I just want to create images.

I was sort of collaging and I would think, “Oh, I’ll collage this work and then I’ll paint it.” But as I progressed I began to realize that everything was changing: there were different ways of printing the work, and perhaps there were things I could use to develop the work that didn’t involve painting.

I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.

Living in the desert makes a lot of things very clear. It really gives you an unobstructed view. The severity of the landscape opens people up to their inner selves. St. Anthony went into the wilderness and was tormented by demons. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. In an unexpected way, the Mojave is a very spiritual place.

Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city?

Technology also made some of the established principles of image-making meaningless, such as the idea that symmetrical images are more static and perhaps less interesting than asymmetrical images. Symmetry is easier to achieve with mechanical means, so I used my collection of digital tools to break the rules, explore perfect symmetry and create repeatable patterns. Digital Camera, 2017

It has occurred to me that when one is raised in the absence of culture – without access to galleries and museums – one has to fill the void. I turned to books, album covers, magazines, slides and prints – anything visually stimulating that I could lay my hands on.

Looking into the mirror I ask myself: "You live in a house equipped with air conditioning. You eat tasty food. You utilize convenient transportation to travel. You utilize convenient information technology to live. Could you not say that you, who do all this, are not a dictator? Isn't it right that you life is supported by somebody else's death? Doesn't your life that exists at the expense of somebody else's sacrifice infinitely resemble the life of a dictator who only cares about his own life?" -Yasumasa Morimura (excerpt from "Mr. Morimura's Dictator Speech").

My work was very meticulous and very slow as a painter and so the difficulty was—the question that my graduate thesis program had—was “how are you going to make a living doing this?” After I graduated, I continued on in the same way, but I discovered that I was progressing very quickly as an artist, and that before my pieces were done, I was getting tired of them. So I knew I had to find something that moved along quicker, that followed my natural path of growth as an artist.

Pop is about speaking everybody's language. The imagery and iconography we instantly recognize. When you can rely on things that the public already knows, you're dealing with Pop.

Sometimes knowing what to shoot is a big relief. Other times, being extemporaneous is the way to go. I love to go out and see what the universe is presenting to me on any given day. Learning to be sensitive to what is out there with no preconceived idea is a wonderful way to discover new subject matter. But only looking for the shot that presents itself in the moment seldom creates new technical skills. In order to master the camera, I give myself special assignments. Giving yourself an assignment helps you to learn about photography and your equipment. By knowing what you want to achieve, you can plan things out. This way you can slow things down. Shoot and confirm. Take notes. Concentrate on getting the shot just right! You will learn to master Aperture Priority, shutter speed, ISO, manual settings, and more. Digital Camera, 2018

The culture of our world, right now, is crafted by little boys who only recall being stood up on their first date, and nothing they got after. They don't remember the sand they kicked in other people's eyes, only their own injuries. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.

The gestalt of living in the desert, surrounded by the desert, was a big influence in my life and in the lives of other artists in this community. There are many artists and musicians who grew up as lonely kids in the desert with nothing to do, and who chose to channel their focus inward. In the Mojave Desert, numinous, mystical experiences are not as rare as one might think. The numinous is a part of the whole artistic experience for the desert artist.

The main criticism was really “he just presses a filter and gets these images.” But then they’d realize that I had learned how to paint and how to draw—that I had paid my dues, and I’d also been a graphic artist and a technical illustrator. And so I was able to show that I could draw with technical pens—and do anything that anyone else could do—and yet still was fascinated by this, and that sort of opened people up a little bit more. The more they knew about me, the more open they were to my explorations in the digital field.

The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.

The Mojave Desert is a harsh, but very spiritual, place. It’s as much a matrix as anything else in my life has been. Growing up in the desert has a different gestalt than growing up in a temperate zone, with its humidity and rainfall. As children growing up in the Mojave, we chased lizards and snakes, instead of frogs and squirrels. There is an arid openness about it, and a true feeling of being alone, that you don’t get in any other type of environment.

The temptation is always to think of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca, the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’. Well, it’s that. But, it’s a lot more than that as well. There are beautiful natural rock formations, rare plants and animals, and even pseudo-alpine regions. Just because you can see for a hundred miles doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there to see, and open desert allows you to see things in a different way. There is nothing to block your view, and nothing to hide behind.

... the function of giving enjoyment and pleasure leads any sensate art at is decadent stage to degrade one of its own socio-cultural values to a mere means of sensual enjoyment on the level of 'wine, women and song'. Second, in its endeavour to portay reality as it appears to our senses, it becomes the art of pregressively thinner and more illusory surfaces instead of reflecting the essence of sensory phenomena. Thus it is destined to become ever more superficial, puerile, empty and misleading. Third, in its quest for sensory and sensational 'hits', for stimulation and excitement as the necessary conditions for sensory enjoyment, it is increasingly and fatally deflected from positive to negative phenomena — from ordinary types and events to those which are pathological, from the fresh air of normal socio-cultural reality to the social sewers, until it becomes a museum of pathology and of negative aspects of sensory reality. Fourth, its charming diversity impels it to seek ever-greater variety, until all harmony, unity and balance are submerged in an ocean of incoherency and chaos. Fifth, this diversity, together with the effort to give pleasure, and to stimulate, leads to an increasing complication of technical means; and this, in turn, tends to make of these instrumentalities an end in themselves — one which is pursued to the detriment of the inner value and quality of fine arts. Sixth, sensate art, as we have seen, is the art of the professional artists creating for the public. Such specialization, while in itself a distintic advantage, results, in the later phases of sensate culture, in the separation of artists from the community — a factor from whichboth parties suffer, as well as the fine arts themselves.

When I first started showing the “Indra’s Jewels” work, I had people coming out of the woodwork saying “Who is this guy? What is he doing? Who does he think he is doing this stuff?” and the more they’d find out they’d go “Oh, he was a painter? He taught for more than decade on the university level? He knows what he’s talking about? Oh, well let’s look at it a little closer.

When I take a picture of a derelict sign, I already begin to see and find the patterns and shapes that will form the final piece. Once I get the image in the studio, I begin to layer the patterns created, making sure to save the patterns I particularly like. I never lose a layer of work during this process; I simply continue to build and modify those patterns that appeal to me. Digital Camera, 2017

Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.

While I began my career as a painter in the early 1980s, I became increasingly curious about the possibilities promised by digital tools - so I switched my traditional media for computer equipment. Digital Camera, 2017

With the academic background that I had, I found that I was able to stretch my imagination and stretch my exploration beyond what I thought I was capable of, which was really fascinating to me, and very fulfilling.

Van Gogh, Modigliani, Hiroshige, etc., didn’t know merde about yachts, 8-star hotels, infinite pools, private jets...

You’ve got to do what interests you. And it can’t matter [how popular it is]—maybe it’s not what’s current now, or what’s being celebrated—but sooner or later people will take notice because it’ll have a vibrancy and a truthfulness to it; it is you, it’s you speaking, it’s you painting. So to me, I thought, why fight it? Let’s see how it goes. I have nothing better to do in this life, so let’s just see where it goes, and where it takes me.