Alex Cox Quotes

My art became very public.

I like the idea that people hear my stuff, and if it's commercially successful, that's a good sign that it's being heard.

The great thing about being an artist is, we want our work to be seen.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world and I don't know whether fancy being slagged off by the literary world as well. It's just too much.

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.

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

I have a suggestion for all of those award seekers and blue ribbon hunters. Spend your efforts on making art that connects with people. Awards impress the grandkids but they don't move the gauge on selling your product. Art needs to touch the emotions of the buyer.

I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led.

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

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

I switched up so that I could work 12-hour shifts at the firm on the weekends so I could have days free to paint. But it was almost like I had a secret life, because I wasn't showing any of my work. It was just in my house. In '89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That's when I started to get into group shows. Suddenly I sort of "came out" as an artist.

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician.

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you've got. Just don't plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.

I remember my friends at primary and secondary school admiring my work and even paying me money for some of my pieces.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.