Top 1200 Conceptual Art Quotes & Sayings

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.

I love conceptual art and artistic expression.

The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

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.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand.

One of my most strong memories was studying with Mel Bochner, one of the, I think, high water marks of American conceptual art.

In fact I always disliked conceptual art, because my work is about anarchistic humor.

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

We, as band, always positioned ourselves between art and entertainment, which often works against us - Fischerspooner is between business models. Art is about limiting access to the product to create value, and entertainment is about dispersing it. We've put ourselves in a position where, if we reach conceptual perfection, it's career suicide.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Conceptual art, I don't even know what that is.

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

What art is not processed? "Conceptual art." Somebody making a painting has to conceive of the size. I don't understand where these words came from. I can't accept the fact that the concept of art as our concept of humanity is expanding.

Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

Im not trying to do conceptual art.

People who look at art don't really - don't go with the artist. They don't sort of accept what he or she has done and kind of go with it. There are always - either there's too much color or not enough color, either it's not conceptual enough or it's too conceptual. In other words, most criticism isn't what the viewer expected that it would do based on what they think you have done and that's good as far as I'm concerned.

The whole idea of a trade deal is to build a fence around participants inside and give them an advantage over the outside. So there's a conceptual flaw in that, one of many conceptual flaws in NAFTA.

I am not really interested in clothing as a conceptual art form.

I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people’s marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven’t crashed the codes, and if you don’t know what it is, you feel it’s a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it’s fraud.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light.

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

I always thought there was a - even in the most, quote, "conceptual art," there is always a physical aspect to it. I never knew what the term meant.

I buy a lot of fashion, and I wear many different brands. Even though I'm not so conceptual in my style, I probably buy the most from Junya Watanabe. It's always so spot on and of-the-moment although it's also so sophisticated and conceptual. I also love Marco de Vincenzo, Azzedine Alaia, and Yohji Yamamoto.

I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

The idea of making [conceptual] art was not a good way to approach things... Instead I saw myself as trying to make something that my relatives could understand.

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art-I still see this.