Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I almost never draw a completely naked man. He has to have at least a pair of boots or something on. To me, a fully dressed man is more erotic than a naked one. A naked man is, of course beautiful, but dress him in black leather or a uniform - ah, then he is more than beautiful, then he is sexy!
I know my little 'dirty drawings' are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if - I would like to say 'when,' but I better say 'if' - our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms.
If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there's got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases.
I took the longest showers of my life after every time I visited Gramacho. It affects the personality of the catadores. They always dress really well, they're very sharp, and when they go out they always wear a lot of perfume because they're very conscious of the possibility of having the smell.
My father is not around any more, so I cannot ask him to do my drawings for me. So, I had to find a different way. And I came up with the solution to use the printers then; I wasn't doing anything complicated. The nature of the printer is efficiency in itself and about working, being productive.
I was never a doodler. I had never felt a drive to draw... Actually when I was a kid, I really hated art classes. My father was a kind of a Sunday painter and he liked to draw and do water colors. So, I would bring him my assignment and he would do them for me, because it was easy for him to do.
Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world. The interrelationships of these individual realms were illumined as by a flash of lightning; they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of the darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided.
I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.
So many people have asked me how I could possibly be a role model and dress like a tramp and get implants... all I have to say is that self-esteem is how you look at yourself and I feel good enough about myself so wear that kind of clothing... the breast implant issue has nothing to do with that.
As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.
You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.
I have always just made things. I don't see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.
If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
Murdoc is sort of the, um, it’s his band. He sort of put Gorillaz together. It’s his idea. But he’s sort of an ugly, sort of, snaggle-toothed Satanist who didn’t actually get the job of being the lead singer ‘cause he isn’t very handsome. So, 2D got the job, which is always going to piss him off.
I'm not a pop artist. For me pop never was.... Pop is concerned with exteriors. I'm concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings. I can spend a lot of time with objects, and they leave me as satisfied as a good meal. I don't think pop artists feel that way.
I've had phases where the compass point seems lost. It can happen for various reasons, among them, that you're trying to do something outside your skill set; your skills have to catch up with the things you see in your head. But it's important to make all of those paintings, even the failed ones.
Inspiration,' the false artist says,'it just comes to me.' And it shows.His pictures are as like as the four walls of his room -- morning, evening, midnight, noon. For myself, I have to search for it. The whole world is your palate, but only if you reach, take hold of what you need and pocket it.
My first book, Fast Forward, was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the UK is because it's everything the British love to hate about the Americans.
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
If you're doing something in the city, then hopefully you're speaking to somebody who has an open mind who is walking by. And you're also speaking to a community of other people who do similar types of work. I like to think that the outdoor community is broad and able and open for anybody to see.
There's no legal protection for cyborgs. In 2010, I started the Cyborg Foundation to defend our rights. Cyborgs have been kicked out from several places because they are seen as a possible security threat. I've been kicked out from places such as Harrods, Casino Montecarlo, and many supermarkets.
When a painter thinks to disengage from the world outside himself and fantasies unprecedented forms he thinks he will make a painting, he finds in this expression the same effect - I would even say the same picture - that he had unconsciously acquired by his habit to experience reality intensely.
Most of the criticism of my work was pretty good, but occasionally it would not be. And I just sort of felt that they absolutely didn't get what I was doing. It was their limitations on what they thought art should be or what they thought my work should be in relation to earlier work or whatever.
My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.
As we get better at things, we need less people to produce the things we really need, but what do we do with the rest of the people? They have to be doing something, too, to buy from those few which are doing the really basic stuff, and so that's why we need to be continually producing new stuff.
I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canva... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.
In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?
When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.
Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.
I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form.
Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
Unlike the marks of a painting, the photo seems to organize its 'opinions' in relation to the world; even when the photographs have clearly been manipulated, the 'opinions' seem to have all the more force, with the suggested 'participation of the world' articulating that 'opinion' as a difference.
The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.
I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
Art fairs are a lot like professional proms - you make contacts, have a lot to look at, and in some cases, you make friends forever. I think that for artists, they can be a bit controversial: they stimulate curiosity, but at the same time, you're always trying to not have your work hung on a wall.
For every child who wants to be accepted wholly and loved unconditionally, there are others who simply want to be accepted for who they are, even if they receive only a fraction of love. I don't think one cancels out the other. I don't believe that there is any right or wrong... we simply coexist.
When you have a dream, you don't even want to tell yourself straight out that this is what you want. You try to hide it. I never told myself I wanted to be a tennis player. But being an artist, yes, this is what I wanted since I first sat down to draw or paint. I knew that . . . I had that vision.
Of course, art in and of itself gives me some feeling of elation or power and is in some way curative. But actually what's interesting at the end of the day is the various interpretations and conversations between us. Something that exists between us is probably better than you and better than me.
I'm at the point now where I don't really have an agenda. I kind of let things flow, and there's not a narrative. On the set it's usually one or two people, and I'm not trying to choreograph them as I did in the past. I'm really just trying to see what's going on in their minds and in their faces.
For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.
Kira is evil ... There's no denying that ... But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this ... The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness.
The first five minutes in Gramacho is really overwhelming because all of your senses are being attacked. Visually, too, because your eyes move and see fragments of things you recognize, but not quite, so it's very artistic. Your eyes are moving, then there's the smell, and the noise is unbearable.
The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
Because Bin Laden's culture doesn't permit the worship of images, they understand how powerful images are. We wouldn't have thought of creating a visual bomb. In a way, he's chopped down two iconic buildings, and used our very truth imagery, to express himself. It's fascinating... I mean, dreadful.
Think of the problem of the world as a cart. It has to have two wheels. If you have one wheel, the cart doesn't go. If you have one wheel called socialism, it doesn't go. If you have only one wheel called capitalism, it doesn't go. It needs two wheels. These two wheels are capitalism and socialism.
I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it-how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that, the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
The biggest problem for my generation is that people who were born years before us have no concept of us at all. There's a massive gap. I don't know why, but we were really like orphans. Those people competed against us, they hated us and fought for things, and yet they had no interest in our work.