David Antin Quotes

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.

Art is science made flesh.

I worked with someone else's photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn't that be my art?

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

The price we sell things for is not important. What is important is we sell art that has to be replaced. You become good in art by doing art. The more you sell, the more you must produce.

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Art is a way of survival.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

And its object is Art not power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

Sometimes I have compared myself with a scientist or something: when you discover something and you don't expect the whole world to understand it. I always thought I was doing that kind of activity, in art and in music too.