Anthony Marra Quotes

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

I see groups that are hot one minute, and next time you see them, they're asking if you want a soda with that Happy Meal.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.

This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.

I am a pop artist, so my medium is public opinion and the world is my canvas.

Andy [Warhol] put on his fey kind of act, but he wanted to be number one and he succeeded. But you never know. Fifty years from now he might not be seen as so important, but the way our whole culture has gone, and the way it continues to go, is his way - for better or for worse.

I really don't own any jewelry. I paint it, but I'm not a consumer. I buy art - that's all I want.

Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it's disposable.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

As soon as people enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.

It's always consoling to know that today's Christmas gifts are tomorrow's garage sales.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn't even your trip. They don't even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane).

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.