A Quote by Rashid Johnson

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.
The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists.
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.
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.
You get an idea what a manager has to go through every day. His is at a very high level. He has situations he has to deal with and the expectations he has to deal with, the personalities he has to deal with. It's a lot.
I think one of the concerns, anytime you're in the human business, like sports, it's a very high - risk endeavor. You do have to get players every year. You have to deal with calendar. You have to deal with all kinds of things in our sport, like every sport does.
I love thinking about things subtextually and I actually - like for instance when I write, I actually, I'm not very analytical about it. I don't ever deal with the subtext because I just know it's there so I don't have to deal with it. I just keep it about the scenario. I keep it on the surface, on my concerns. And one of the fun things is is when I'm done with everything, like now, for instance.
If you go too far, it'll blow your mind. I mean it's strong out there. If you go out too far beyond the bounds of attention, there are things in the universe, in the universes of mind, in the inner worlds, it's best sometimes not to deal with unless you're very, very far along.
Since I didn't grow up going to school dances, etc., I didn't have the normal . . . I grew up in a very different way so a lot of the childish concerns or teenage concerns weren't my concerns. My concerns were survival.
Sometimes money isn't the determinant. But it sure as hell makes a huge difference. Nobody is saying "Well, thank God we don't need to raise money any longer." It's a very, very big deal to have money, and it is a very, very big deal to have more than your opponent.
American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.
Fine artists deal with finery, but I deal with painful material.
I think it's something that you learn to deal with the more experienced you become. When I first presented live news, which was 12 years ago, I was very inexperienced and probably didn't deal with the pressure as well. I used to breathe very shallow when I was presenting and you could hear it in my voice and see it in my face.
I wrote 'The Art of the Deal' and numerous other books. Some were number one best-sellers. I guess 'The Art of the Deal' is the best-selling business book of all time.
I can assure you Mr. Zureikat never gave me a penny from an oil deal, a cake deal, a bread deal or from any other deal.
I think that a great deal of what made America special is lost beyond recall, and I don't have any good policy ideas that I am at all confident will go very far in bringing that back.
Let me make the Workers' Party's position clear: When we deal with public discourse, I think it's very helpful, in fact it's critical, that we all deal with objective information.
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