Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

There's a point where art is not subjective, and my example for that is Picasso. If you don't like Picasso, that's your problem.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.