JR Quotes

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can.

Art is not meant to change the world.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change - it can not only move us, it makes us move.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

I believe an artiste is a reflection of society. I write what I see. I am not a scholar, I am just an entertainer. I cannot change the way people think.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.

What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

The purpose of art is to reflect new emerging values and to define the new heroes and heroines so that people can absorb them into their perceptions.

Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.

Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

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

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before.

Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

There are various art forms we may or may not have talent for, may or may not have time for, and we may or may not be able to express ourselves in, but we ought to consider this fact-that whether we choose to be an environment or not, we are. We produce an environment other people have to live in. We should be conscious of the fact that this environment which we produce by our very 'being' can affect the people who live with us or work with us.

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.