Steve Erickson Quotes

My artwork is in order to seduce people into thinking.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

I want to seduce my viewers and be able to hold them with the work. Much of that is done in terms of formalist ideas that I bring to the work.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

I believe that true art is universal in its appeal.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

To me, at its best, that's what art should do, perform both the emotional and intellectual function.

All art is about appealing to emotion.

This is about relationships, about the placement of potent colors and the canvas sparkling through. I want the eye to dance across the canvas but direct you, too.

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

Art is manipulation without intervention.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.