Quotes from Carl Andre

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

I believe that woman are superior to men.

You can always find somebody to beat up. This goes back to the schoolyard. Most men would think, Don't chum with girls. But I chummed with girls.

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist.

What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.

I never drove a car in my life. Given my drinking habits in those days, I would have been dead a long time ago - stumbling out of a bar at 4 a.m. and getting into a car.

It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

Art is what we do and culture is what they do to us.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

I think my work is very American because I'm American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.