A Quote by Kiki Smith

Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer. — © Kiki Smith
Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.
What I never wanted in art - and why I probably didn't belong in art - was that I never wanted viewers. I think the basic condition of art is the viewer: The viewer is here, the art is there. So the viewer is in a position of desire and frustration. There were those Do Not Touch signs in a museum that are saying that the art is more expensive than the people. But I wanted users and a habitat. I don't know if I would have used those words then, but I wanted inhabitants, participants. I wanted an interaction.
Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
Go to the source for ideas, go to the Metropolitan Museum, find your inspiration in nature, go to the Museum of Natural History, but never rely on something that someone else has done.
I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)
The Best of the artist's art, which will one day be in a Museum wall, the Painting that sets the artist apart of all other artist artists.
Movies always fascinated me. They are an endless source of inspiration. There are countless images by great directors that made a profound impression on me, and I see film as a sublime example of teamwork.
The main difference between the art of the actor and all other arts is that every other [non-performing] artist may create whenever he is in the mood of inspiration. But the artist of the stage must be the master of his own inspiration, and must know how to call it forth at the hour announced on the posters of the theatre. This is the chief secret of our art.
A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.
Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.
Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.
My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.
I'm married to an artist. I get a lot of inspiration from art, from the lighting in art, from the compositions in art, from the textures, and all of that. I'm always playing with it.
The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.
The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.
Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.
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