Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Walead Beshty

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

I certainly like it if the work is beautiful, but that's a surplus effect. I can only think about that after I consider how it's made.

There's a generative material relationship between the material and the image that comes up.

I was interested in making work that physically changed as it circulated through the art world.

My works look to how images are produced, but specially based upon how the material reacts.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

[X-ray's] accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with, and belief in, the power of technological transparency: the desire to domesticate time (cinema), to preserve and capture the surface of the fleeting (photography), to see inside (x-ray).

There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.

I'm not particularly invested in, nor do I really care about, photography in a general sense. It's a medium that's relatively ubiquitous, readily accessible, and that I have some facility with, so it makes sense for me to use it.