David LaChapelle Quotes

The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

Now people ask whether photography is art, but I think the question is of absolutely no interest.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

We talk too much of black art when we should be talking about art, just art. Black composers must be free to write rondos and fugues, not only protest songs.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.

But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

I began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.