Jasper Johns Quotes

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

The whole Modernist lie is that art is about the artist.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

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

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.