Samuel Beckett Quotes

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't.

My pictures are complex and so am I. When I am almost symbolistic in writing, there is a more limiting difference’s of accepting, while I can be even more complex in the photographs and people can usually accept them within the framework of their own limitations or lack of limitations – there is no dictionary meaning… they can look up for the photographic image and allow it to confuse them.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

I'm glad I made a piece of art that can be interpreted so widely. Art is always interpreted subjectively.

I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.

I do like how the music can be misunderstood.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.