Quotes from Claes Oldenburg

A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

The sexual is part of everything, and it's highly formalized. I hadn't done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, "Why not the erotic figure?"

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

My single-minded aim is to give existence to fantasy.

'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.

Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.