David Hockney Quotes

The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

I will not make anymore boring art.

There have been countless changes in the long history of art. The most significant have been brought about by the genius of a single artist.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality.

New arts destroy the old.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork... they will receive my new work als they always have when something new presents itself: with indignation and screams of scorn.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental.

Past art is subject to change.

With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.

The art of tomorrow will be a collective treasure, or it will not be art at all.

Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard...Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.