Things Better Artists Have Said About Art

  • “I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.”

    — Jean-Michel Basquiat

  • “Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks.”

    — Mark Rothko

  • “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”

    — Georgia O’Keeffe

  • “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”

    — Frida Kahlo

  • “Life is art, art is life. I never separate it”

    — Ai Weiwei

  • "We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don't completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art."

    — Takashi Murakami

  • "It's not my job to tell people what a work means."

    — Maurizio Cattelan

  • “Art, for me, is a context to slow the viewer's experience from their everyday life in order to think about things they haven't thought about. Or to think in a new way.”

    — Tom Friedman

  • "I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing."

    — Barry McGee

  • “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

    — Andy Warhol

  • “Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.”

    — Yayoi Kusama

  • "You don't exist if you're not represented."

    — Eva Hesse

  • “I see how much responsibility you have as an artist. You are the reflection of our times. So whether you’re a writer, a dancer, filmmaker, painter, or sculptor…You are reflecting the times that we live in, and after you’re gone, all that is left is that reflection.”

    — Bisa Butler

  • "Everything can't be personalized. I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary."

    — Barbara Kruger

  • “Today I said, 'I really don't care.' Yesterday, in a similar situation, I said, 'It's none of your business?' Before that, it was 'What the hell are you trying to say?' And before that, 'Leave me alone' ...Sometimes I spit out words like 'Shit!' 'Damn!' 'Jesus!' The air vibrates and roars. If you listen closely, you can hear flames of anger. It is like a dragon belching out fire. Whenever I spit out these words, I feel a little better, and it helps a little, if just a little, to put out the fire.”

    — Yoshitomo Nara

  • "I go to make art as who I am as a person. The fact that I am a woman comes into play maybe in the kinds of things I'm interested in or in the way I structure a canvas. I think what's important is to give space to the range of human experience."

    — Judy Chicago

  • “Sometimes in life you are born feeling like a bit of an outsider. When that happens you realize that you have to kind of cut your own path in life.”

    — SWOON

  • "Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures."

    — Pipilotti Rist

  • "Today, just as yesterday, art wants to save from death a living image of our passions and our sufferings."

    — Albert Camus

  • “You can’t use up creativity. The more the you use, the more you have.”

    — Maya Angelou

  • “To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it.”

    — Kurt Vonnegut