Art Making Quotes

I take on a philosophical and postmodernist approach to the art-making process, investigating problems on a personal and intuitive level. This process is what fuels my mind and informs me, raises new questions, and gives my work resonance.

If art could be absolutely verified as to importance in, say, the way gold can be judged for purity and weight, then it would of course be finished as mythic activity. Free of doubt, controversy, and the inexplicable fluctuation of reputation, art-making would bear the same relationship to creativity as cake mix does to baking.

I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad making art, making movies.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

This is what I call participation in the world of ideas. That is what art-making is.

Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting.

The hardest part of art-making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done-over and over-and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go to that space, I’m completely in this world of possibility.

I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

When I get to the drawing, I really enjoy taking a big chunk of time and working on the drawing and nothing else. That allows me to make sure that I'm really challenging the art, making each picture as interesting as I can.

Collage has been one of the most relevant forms of art making. It's resonant because it is made of the stuff that we see every day. It's familiar. It reflects our reality.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

Art-making is just another part of the consciousness industry.

Of course, the process of curating is different from art making. Exhibition-making is a process that involves collaboration with various participating artists.

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

If you take a flower to Mars, for example, the hostility of Mars probably won't allow the flower to live without oxygen. The process of being an artist, for someone who wasn't born in an arts-centric environment - I came from the Bahamas, where there's not a historic tradition of art-making, at least from the Western prospective - in a way is kind of an alien concept.

One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

The process of art-making is full of happy accidents - what fun!

Expression is never considered a given, and it is in fact maybe not what's most interesting about making art. Making art, since 1960 or something, is many things: it's a way of doing philosophy, it's a way of opening a dialogue, it's a way of putting a fact or a question out into the world, or a way of drawing people into new relationships, or a way of interrogating history. It's all these other sorts of strategies or techniques or processes that are really interesting and really valuable.