A Quote by Walter Darby Bannard

Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

Walter Darby Bannard

Quote Topics

Art Attributes Concepts Conceptual Conceptual Art Fact Oxymoron Quality Supposition

Quote Author

Walter Darby Bannard
American - Painter
September 23, 1934 - October 2, 2016

I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art-I still see this.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

William H. Gass

Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

M.I.A.

Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

Alexander Stoddart

What art is not processed? "Conceptual art." Somebody making a painting has to conceive of the size. I don't understand where these words came from. I can't accept the fact that the concept of art as our concept of humanity is expanding.

Lawrence Weiner

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

Paul Simonon

In fact I always disliked conceptual art, because my work is about anarchistic humor.

Dan Graham

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

Andrei Codrescu

Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.

Mike Royer

There is a good deal of art that in some traditions of conceptual work are anti-affect, in fact a very large chunk of mainstream art after 1950 took against affect art altogether because they said, "No, we hate affect art because this is how we get manipulated by totalitarianism and therefore artists shouldn't play that game." And a lot of artists agreed to play that game, which I personally believe is to the loss of art.

Laura Belem

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Sol LeWitt

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Damien Hirst

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.

Alfred North Whitehead

I view all art as an effort to translate brain concepts into a work. These brain concepts are synthetic ones - the result of many experiences. But a single work of art, or even a series of works, more often than not cannot translate these synthetic concepts adequately. Yves Saint Laurent once said that he suffered greatly when creating. He is not alone in that. Most artists do the same and say as much.

Semir Zeki

Our human landscape is overburdened with competitions and contests. Art need not be a contest. Art is a personal quest for quality. Quality is the forerunner of acceptance. Character is the forerunner of quality. Be your own discriminating connoisseur.