Quotes About Art

Ideas' can be only in the distant background of a work of art, something like a very low horizon. In the middle distance and foreground... there shouldn't be any 'ideas' visible.

It isn't illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!

That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.

My work is received more intelligently in Europe.

Usually people just do their own work. But I want to deal with the place and what it means to show in a mental hospital.

I don't know if Yves St Laurent likes my work but Pierre Bergé does.

Directors are our teachers, and I'm always craving to work with a great director. They're pretty much the first thing that interests me about a project.

Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work.

The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition.

The worst thing you can do is animate something, and then throw it out because it doesn't work, story wise.

In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

I'm a quiet person, I'm not a flashy art world person. I'm in the studio in the middle of nowhere. There's sheep and fields. The work has to be authentic in that way.

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.

Of course, all my work is photographed and I also take quite a lot of photographs of work in production.

Obviously, I don't make an entire edition all at once, so the studio often goes back to produce editions, but that's a bit different. I guess I'm always thinking about the next work.

I tend to work towards specific exhibitions, so there will often be a big push towards the end when we're finishing off a bunch of stuff.

You make a horror film that's not very good. You'd be joining a long line, in a long video aisle, of stuff that doesn't work.

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.

I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.