Shepard Fairey Quotes

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

You always want your films to go as far as they can.

I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

Art is competitive.

I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

Art is the job of the privileged.

The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

Art suggests stuff that is traded like money, that is kept in galleries and that belongs to the elite, whereas experience is something that everybody has in the course of living.

Money messes up everything. It ruins art. The second you start putting price tags on this stuff, it's... Art isn't for just the wealthy. It's for everybody to enjoy.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.

Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities.

I know what kind of artist I want to be, what I'm capable of, what I'm not capable of.

Actors love to do good work irrespective of country and borders.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

I don't see art as entertainment.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

Art should never try to be popular.

In my teens I fancied myself an artist; I hung out with the eccentric art teacher at my high school, painted still lifes and portraits and landscapes in watercolor and acrylics, took private lessons, won some blue ribbons for my earnest renderings. My lack of talent did little to dampen my enthusiasm. In college I thought I'd continue, but, like Salieri, I quickly realized that while I had the ability to appreciate art, I wasn't actually very good.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.