Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance, form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.

The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

You don't base records on success; you base it on creativity.

I don't think you can approach any piece of art with boundaries or rules. I think respect is a very important thing, but I also think what we discover along the way is really important.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

I've never seen bad drawing destroy a good idea. On the other hand, I've never seen a good drawing save a bad idea.

I never start anything with a really overt, political, or even exactly artistic mission statement.

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

A painting doesn't have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people's needs.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

If you want to communicate something, you'd better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

All good art is an indiscretion.