Mark Tobey Quotes

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.

I would see anything by Antony Gormley.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

My favorite Twombly is 'Apollo and the Artist,' with the big 'Apollo' written across it.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we’re living in. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

I feel it's my social responsibility to shine a light on areas that don't get seen. My personal feeling is that it's an artist's responsibility to be engaged with the culture. And when the culture is going through turmoil, I think an artist can't ignore that. I don't feel that every artist has to be politically engaged, but I can't imagine that you can be an active participant of this culture and not in some way reflect that in the work you are creating.

I've learned a lot about the limits of what I can do, as an artist, or what I'm willing to do. It's a lot of responsibility to carry a show and to speak to people on different levels.

Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.

In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.

This is the thing: Art is more important than making a show, something that amuses people. Art is something that needs to give to the public, to the actors, to the artist - to give something that makes life the paradise it can be. Life can be a paradise. Still, I believe that. Even if there is Trump, there can be a paradise.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.