A Quote by Tom Wolfe

'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves. — © Tom Wolfe
'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.
When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways.
Money is completely boring to me. It means nothing, except it feeds my art. Every penny I make goes back into the Haus of GaGa. My Haus of GaGa is something like Andy Warhol's Factory.
Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.
Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.
Most fantasy is incredibly derivative of Tolkien, so when you read a lot of fantasy, it's really just elves and gnomes, and it all goes back to Tolkien.
It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery method continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God.
This is just the way it goes: there's always a cycle with music - it goes up and it goes down, it goes risque and it goes back, it goes loud then it goes soft, then it goes rock and it goes pop.
When I went to college, and I went to art school, I started to realize that Warhol was cool and that pop art was fun.
Warhol had resonance because it was high art and low art. And you could argue about it endlessly.
So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.
I have called this phenomenon of stealing common knowledge and indigenous science "biopiracy" and "intellectual piracy." According to patent systems we shouldn't be able to patent what exists as "prior art." But the United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as "prior art." Therefore anyone from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention or an innovation.
The only way a work of art can become great is for one to acknowledge that it doesn't belong to anybody. The greatness is in constantly giving back, coming to an acknowledgment of the source. Look back to the source of any individual, any process, any set of materials. If the individual personality can relinquish its insistence on concepts like this is mine, I did it, this is original, nobody else has done it, it goes straight for greatness or the essential spirit.
Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.
I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!