A Quote by Richard Serra
Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals.
I think a lot of people are involved in art because of the fashion of art and the conversation. It gives them a certain sophistication, something to speak about. But art is, if it's conceptual, really about understanding the concept. And if it's beautiful, it's about seeing the beauty. It's gone much further than that now. There's too much commercialism attached to art. If the market cracks one day big-time, you'll frighten so many people away who will never come back. Because they don't really feel for art. People who buy art should want it because they love it, they want to enjoy it.
Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.
Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.
Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.
What is the art experience about? Really, I'm not interested in making Art at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word Art, it's almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.
Some people don't think that what I do is art - but for me art exists by definition. The beautiful and most liberating thing about being an artist is the ability to say that what I make is art. Art exists because the author says so.
Writing about something specific, in my mind, was overwhelming, so I wrote about art because I love art and I know I can say a couple of funny things about art.
I mean, part of the justification for art is art history, the fact that you're part of this tradition. You can't really operate outside of it. So looking for what this work is really about, if I look at Velázquez, if I look at Las Meninas or The Tapestry Weavers [1657] or something and really study it and try to figure out what that painting is really about, then I find relationships between what I'm trying to do and what he was doing.
Oscar Wilde quite rightly said, 'All art is useless'. And that may sound as if that means it's something not worth supporting. But if you actually think about it, the things that matter in life are useless. Love is useless. Wine is useless. Art is the love and wine of life. It is the extra, without which life is not worth living.
I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.
I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.
I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.
When I think about the reference to baroque, I'm most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That's why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It's art, but it's decoration at the same time.
Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art.' It's here, art's everywhere. It's how you use your eyes. It's about the enjoyment of visual things. And it's certainly not for any one group of people.
I teach art at a famous art school, and yet I don't have really the least notion what post-modernism means, but we have people in the letters and science department that understand it quite well and the students go there if they want to understand what this term that is being bandied about is all about, but I've never understood it.
Related Authors
Alberto Giacometti Quotes
Swiss
Sculptor
Alexander Calder Quotes
American
Sculptor
Auguste Rodin Quotes
French
Sculptor
Bruce Nauman Quotes
American
Sculptor
Camille Claudel Quotes
French
Sculptor
Claes Oldenburg Quotes
Swedish
Sculptor
Constantin Brancusi Quotes
Romanian
Sculptor
Eva Hesse Quotes
American
Sculptor
Gutzon Borglum Quotes
American
Sculptor
Hans Arp Quotes
English
Sculptor
Henry Moore Quotes
English
Sculptor
Justin Bieber Quotes
Canadian
Sculptor
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson Quotes
American
Sculptor
Ruth Asawa Quotes
American
Sculptor
Willard Wigan Quotes
English
Sculptor