A Quote by Billy Al Bengston

For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.
I think of what I do for work as playing/jamming. Music for me is so much fun so I don't take my work very seriously in terms of not being humorous, but I take it absolutely seriously in terms of taking the time to make it as rich and glorious as possible.
For me becoming a painter was an Everest, in terms of what I thought a painter was. There are many roads to becoming an artist. For me it wasn't art school. I didn't have that go to art school and then get a gallery. It's more like, how deep is your inner library to cull from. It's certainly not about technical prowess, just about depth of investigation. It takes time. I had 15 years of painting under my belt before my first New York show. I was glad to have that. It's a good thing to spend your twenties getting your craft.
Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.
Street art belongs on the street. But I'm a working street artist and I earn my money selling art in the style of street art via galleries.
What's happening in the larger world always influences art. When I first started the gallery in 1959, one of the first things I learned was that most people assume artists know one thing and one thing only - that they were idiot savants. I found very quickly that most artists were very informed and very aware of what was happening in the world around them. So all of those things go together, especially for earthworks. And at that time there was such an intense interest in American art. So there was a great deal of attention paid to where it was going.
I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
I'm from a country where acting is taken very seriously; it's a very serious profession.
My whole family is very art-based. My sister runs a gallery, my other sister works for PACE in New York, my other sister is a sculptor. I'd say the ending one is me because that's the artist and the artist feels a lot.
In the days when I wasn't being taken seriously, I wore long skirts - very conservative. But now, I dress any way I want to.
The fact that people are embracing me so well as a new artist and being taken so seriously is something I'm really surprised by.
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
Definitely, it's hard being a young artist and being taken seriously.
I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.
And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.
I visit a lot of art galleries. I live in Dublin and there's a very good gallery called the Kevin Kavanagh gallery.
[Magic] Johnson is seriously remarkable, in terms of what he has accomplished in his profession and outside of his profession as well.
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