Norbert Wiener Quotes

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Successful artists don't follow trends; they create them.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

What I'm working on is for people to be able to say that Kippenberger had this really good mood.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there's an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.

Frank Sinatra changed people's approach to singing. Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, van Gogh, they were all part of movements that allowed people to think about their craft differently. They changed the game. These people changed the game.

Greedo is one of the most important California artists of our generation.

If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

At some future time I shall see New York the artist's ground. I think you will create an American School.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

I just feel like I'm an artist that still has set a standard for artists that come up to follow and be like...So, yeah, I guess I'm a legend somewhat, I guess in my own right, but I still got a long ways to go.