Rachel Kushner Quotes

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.

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

Buying art is not understanding 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 don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

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

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

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.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

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

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

I'm not really well educated - other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Artists talk in 'art speak.'

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.