Rirkrit Tiravanija Quotes

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

I enjoy looking, learning, smiling, and engaging with art, sometimes even rejecting it.

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.

It's not that I can't find art beautiful. I just don't know what to do, standing there in the gallery. I don't know what to think about. Once I've seen it, I've seen it; that takes about two seconds. I am interested and then immediately bored, immediately.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Buying art is not understanding art.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sane standing in front of you and politely engaging with you. People react.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Overhearing people's conversations about art - that's always entertaining.

You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion.