Quotes About Nonconformity

I like druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains. I like their lack of training, their primitive technique. I think it hurts you, when you stay too long in school.

Avant-garde is French for bullshit

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

Art should not have to be a certain way.

Art should make you think and feel. It doesn't have to match your couch.

Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly.

All art is based on non-conformity.

I'm not interested in pop art.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

When I was 10, I knew there was something different about me. Everyone was football-mad, but I just wanted to watch musicals and see art.

Art should never try to be popular.

If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.

I'm in this whole flow of doing certain art pieces without commerce.

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

When I was just getting started making my own music, my dad said, "You should think about art, but also anti-art and non-art."

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent

Fine art is the discipline of breaking rules.

Don't be cool. Like everything.

Art is freedom. Being able to bend things most people see as a straight line.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.