A Quote by Claes Oldenburg

I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum. — © Claes Oldenburg
I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman introduced me as being "in favor of assimilation." I said, "I'm not in favor of assimilation." I am no more in favor of assimilation than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. Assimilation is not something to oppose or favor - it just happens.
Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?
You don't just find an empty museum and say, "I should do something here." I was looking for another kind of venue or exhibition format. I was trying to find a site where something could happen over a long period of time - something that could slowly transform itself and the place as it went. And I was also trying to stand out of the art-world system. Strangely enough, I stumbled on vacant museum.
Really it becomes a question of architecture. How do you move people through a space and allow them to have an experience? I, probably more than most people, suffer from museum fatigue. I always want to just stay still or sit in a chair and look at one thing, but that's not the experience of the museum.
Sometimes to write you need to do more than just appear at your desk-you need to take care of the part of you that dreams and imagines and creates. Reading can usually do this for writers, but sometimes you also need to watch films, listen to music, go to an art museum, or see a play. Or just sit outside and soak up the sky.
If art means as much to you as it does to me, or even if you're just exploring the art world for the first time, I invite you to turn off the boob tube, pry the Wii controllers from your kids' hands, and drag them to a museum.
The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.
I did make several trips to the very wonderful [Georgia] O'Keeffe museum. Besides the art (my favorite paintings are from her Pelvis series) my favorite thing about the museum is the architecture. I love how enormously tall the doors are - it is like going into a church. There is also something home-like about the layout of the museum. I wish I could live there!
I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life.
We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.
The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.
Art inspires me. Looking at art in a museum, listening to music, reading the works of other writers.
What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.
When I decided to go to art school, it wasn't necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.
Fighting is art and there is nothing more beautiful than the painted canvas of just totally kicking someone's ass.
At our house, my father loved the arts. Among his favorite things was 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art Album of Miniatures' - a box set of small books on different art periods. I'd go into the living room at night and sit on the arm of his chair as he studied the images.
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