Posts tagged quotes

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antenna of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

When Picasso died I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime and I thought, ‘Gee, I could do that in a day.’ So I started. And then I found out, ‘Gee, it takes more than a day to do four thousand pictures’. You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day. And they’d all be masterpieces because they’d all be the same painting. And I started and I got up to about five hundred and then I stopped. But it took more than a day, I think it took a month.

You are more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn. Some day when I become supreme Ultra-Lord of the universe…you will live in my 200 story castle where unicorn servants will feed you doughnuts off their horns.

People have never dressed as badly as they do now…We are so conformist, nobody is thinking. We have been trained to be consumers and we are all consuming far too much…So I’m saying buy less, choose well, make it last. Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

For a variety of reasons, the immanent future of art-as-a-meme does not bode well for traditional art institutions. The first, and arguably most important reason is the way in which our psychological criterion of validation is gradually shifting, Facebook account by Facebook account and Wikipedia entry by Wikipedia entry, away from a belief that the information we ingest should be dictated by a rarified group of connoisseurs and towards the idea of peer-to-peer affirmation.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.