A Quote by Claes Oldenburg

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions. — © Claes Oldenburg
I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.
I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"
One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.
Fairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.
Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.
Doing TV shows helps me a lot in my screenplay writing and filmmaking, especially since my TV shows are in different formats: comedy sketches, talk shows, debate programs, art variety shows, quiz shows. These enable me to meet interesting people with interesting stories and to learn about interesting subjects, all of which I can reflect into film.
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.
All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.
I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.
The issues which mattered to me as an activist, mainly things like prison reform and AIDS, have less of a chance of getting covered on my show than things I don't have a personal interest in. It's because I don't trust my antenna about being a good storyteller on those subjects, because I know a lot and therefore lose touch with what the average person might find interesting about them.
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
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