Marina Abramovic Quotes

Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty.

All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.

The whole point of what I do - the monster ball, the music, the performance art aspect of it, I wanna create a space for my fans where they can feel free and they can celebrate because I didn't fit in in high school and I felt like a freak, so I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they don't feel alone.

It needs great art, learning to play with one's own life, to play on one's own life. Meditation is the art to create music from your heart. Meditation is simply the method to transform noise into harmony, the method to shift your consciousness from the head to the heart. The head is noisy, it is all noise - a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing.

Art goes into the world unarmed, vulnerable to every quirk of fate, and it must survive only by its power to move men not to destroy it.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Art indeed is long, but life is short.

Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like [a] concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

You say I sucked at the Oscars. I was a genius at the Oscars. That was experimental tuxedo sleep art.

I have to say, doing theater, that's what you're trained to do. Doing film, when I first started doing it, felt like something else entirely. It felt like the difference between, I don't know, waiting tables and painting a great work of art. It's night and day. I didn't feel like it was even acting.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

What is needed is not a change of circumstance, but a change of consciousness.

You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?

We change by changing our consciousness and by saying, money should not be a commodity. Money should be a means to an end.

I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.