Quotes About Art

By the '80s, anything to do with punk was perceived as rancid. Me being known as the 'punk poet' meant my work and I plummeted.

There's an irony about making a film about punk because punk isn't supposed to have feature films made about it.

It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.

There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

As to the 'St. Michael,' the subject is very fine, but very difficult, so I doubt that I shall find easily amongst my pupils one capable of carrying it out satisfactorily even after my own drawing. In any case, it will be necessary for me to touch it up carefully with my own hand.

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

Someone made me a Leaf Coneybear finger puppet. Someone made me a portrait of me on some chocolate. I'm keeping it. I daren't eat such a work of art. It's so unique and so fun that fans do that. It's incredibly flattering. I like it when people spend time on me. People don't spend the same amount of time on my brother who's an insurance broker.

Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.

There is no such thing as pure art. It's a bourgeois conceit.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

There are many kinds of truth. But truth communicated by beauty is the only pure one. The only one that touches me in the heart.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

The type of work I like is pure and simple and profound.

My music has to be pure.

'Napoleon' is pure cinema, and cinema was designed for sharing.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.