Quotes About Art

I saw the most beautiful moving painting at the art gallary the other day, but then I realized it was a mirror...

My favorite color on canvas is nudity.

I want to meet a guy named Art. I'd take him to a museum, hang him on the wall, criticize him, and leave.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, sings.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

Some couples buy pots and pans when they move in together. Ulay and I began planning how to make art together.

Art is not just about another beautiful painting that matches your dining room floor. Art has to be disturbing, art has to ask a question, art has to predict the future.

It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: "My paintings are but the ashes of my art.

Much later on, I read a statement of Bruce Nauman's: "Art is a matter of life and death." It sounds melodramatic, but it's so true. This was exactly how it was for me

I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries.

Immaterial art is the strongest because there's no obstacle; there's just energy, and I believe in energy.

If you learn to be a psychoanalyst, and you're working as a psychoanalyst, your job is in that context. If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference. And my context is art.

If you are not passionate in life, you can't be passionate in art.

Theatre is fake ... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

I just want to create situations where people forget time.

Because I did an event with Jay Z, she said I'd killed performance art. But who made these rules?

I think the absence of love in the family and the need to create a family with art world and public is really strong. Psychoanalyst would say it's a clear picture! But it didn't appear like that in the beginning.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

In the beginning, I was a painter, but the moment I stood in front of the public and expressed my ideas using my body as the object and subject of the work, immediately it was clear that this is my best medium. I struggled with acceptance; my early career was hell. But it took me all these years to create a foundation so that performance would become accepted in the same way as photography and video. You have to believe that you're right, even if everybody believes you are wrong.

It was a big base of my performance art ... the idea of here and now ... not something that's happening in the past or the future. It's always happening. It's always now.... Only what matters is the present.