All art is but imitation of nature.
Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.
I wouldn't disrespect myself or my art with any imitations.
Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.
It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
I don't like the word 'experiment' in the context of art in general. It implies something immature, unfinished, something entertaining for a moment before it becomes irrelevant.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.
I enjoy theater just for the sheer excitement of it and the immediate response that you get, and how every night the audience is a little bit different; but then, it's expensive to work in N.Y., and stage work is limited, so you're just doing it for the art.
All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
I think impersonation is a great art. It's something that I enjoy doing, in a frivolous and lighthearted way. But I don't flatter myself to think I'm an impersonator.
That was the impetus for me to do music or art, because I knew if I didn't try when I was young, then I would get to be in my 40's and I'd be really unhappy that I hadn't.
Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.
All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That's an industry, you know. I'm trying to make art on a commercial scale.
For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings, I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.
I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.
