Art World Quotes

I believe that it is important for the artist, painter, poet, dancer, etc. to keep in mind that it is the art that drives the art world and not the other way around. Artists and other people of intelligence have the power to bring deeper content to our culture.

Many with careers in the art world are intimidated, and afraid to speak out against the gospels of Modernist theory.

The art world is now a fashion industry, led by its Whitney Biennial 'nose for the new look.' But nobody, it seems, has the guts or the brains to blow the necessary whistle and holler, 'Hold on guys! What the hell is this ugly bit of business?

Coping with rejection is an important skill to learn and understand when navigating the Art World. Rejection and disinterest is the rule, not the exception.

When you are 'bad' in the art world they are very very scared! They want to control you... and they can't! Individuality and uniqueness are threats to the status quo. It is an artist's job to be an 'outlaw.

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me.

The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

I know if I wasn't making music and acting, I would be involved in the performing arts world in some way. I would be either writing and making music for other artists or producing movies.

With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez.

The art world is a very prissy little thing over in the corner, while the major cultural forces are being determined by techno science.

I don't like to trash talk... I don't know how to do that, it's not me. In the martial arts world that I was brought up it was all about respect.

I think the art world... is a very small pond, and it's a very inbred pond. They rely on information from an elect elite sect of galleries, primarily in New York.

If you look at the size of the art world in terms of the money that is being transacted compared to other parts of the 'consciousness industry,' it is minuscule. But if you look at what happens in this small sector, how it rubs off on the rest of it, it is astonishing.

The art world has become the R&D department for so much fashion and music, so knock-offs are getting better and better.

I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.

While other industries have suffered, the nonprofit arts world continues to build in strength while it encourages the growth of innumerable small businesses on its periphery, thereby creating more jobs.

Under all of the factors that make up the art world, it's up to the individual artist to discern which of those influences are present and at what time and what really serves the deeper process that is constantly running like a stream underground. Influence is incessant. Influence is a fact. But, carry a big shovel and dig constantly to clear away all the unessentials so that the origins of mystery and the poetic force of life can get into and inspire the work.

When I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with.

I never thought, "I'm going to be an artist". When I actually began to become successful in the art world I made it a point to say, 'I am a dilettante, I am not a professional artist", which is true.

Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can…. The art world is high school with money.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

There are so many rules in the art world. I don't like rules and I break them all the time. I don't care if people think I'm overexposed. What I care about is if I'm going to run out of energy. Overexposure is only a problem if you are drained of energy and cannot come up with new ideas. Every artist has to recognize that and know when to stop for a moment.

the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.

Creating art and creating ourselves are the same act; art, world, ourselves - these are continuous with one another.

Why settle for the art world when you can have the whole world?

I love to bring humour into my work. Because comedy is not a huge part of the art world. And big-business film takes itself very seriously.

I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist, whereas film was not.

The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there's pressure to.

Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

I like that the art world isn't regulated.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

There was a kind of cultural life in New York that wasn't as solidified as it is now, it wasn't as money-driven. If you look at the size of the successful art galleries compared to the size of galleries now - there was no such thing as the Gagosian Gallery or Pace Gallery. But it was a time when magazines were a vital part of American life, and Esquire gave me a free pass to every world - I could get to the art world, the theater world, the movie world. It allowed you to roam through the cultural life of New York City.

I cast people from right around me. I was at my alma mater. It's special to have most of the graduate students in it [and] one professor, because I feel like in terms of this school, I was one of the few students lucky enough to break into the art industry or the contemporary art world.

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.

As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.