Quotes from Richard Phillips

The SEALs have a sense of community I've never seen anywhere. Not just the guys but the wives, widows, kids of fallen heroes.

My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery.

My favorite film score is the one Thomas Bangalter created for 'Irreversible.' The soundtrack absolutely defines the daymare-into-nightmare feeling you get from the film.

I'm not a hero. The military is.

I try to get out of an image's way in order to let it articulate what is hidden.

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, 'New Museum,' to be an act of civil disobedience. It's not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It's painting as insurgency.

Fashion is not separate from art. It is inextricably woven into how we open ourselves to the world and articulates the exchanges of power both real and imagined.

People get confused when they see my shows, but that isn't the intention. My intention is to destabilize the act of seeing.

Makeup ignites a psychological transformation of both the wearer and the observer. My paintings sought to locate the subject of art within the manipulation of that altered predisposition.

The most desirable and appropriate solution to piracy is for the United States government to provide protection through military escorts and/or militant detachments aboard U.S. vessels.

If you can get rid of the emotion and concentrate on the problem, you can solve the problem.

Miami's my favorite art fair. I even surfed there one year.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse.

There isn't really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does. Something happens when she steps in front of the camera. There is this magnetic energy.

Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present.

Nothing is over until you quit.

I have the utmost admiration for makeup artists. It's truly magical what they can accomplish with their materials. The face and the body are really their canvas.

If we strive and continue fighting as best we can, we can overcome a lot of the personal and professional problems that we do have.

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.

Anytime money is your main focus, I think we all come to problems.