Jean-Michel Basquiat Quotes

I always loved art shows at schools. My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art... It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

You get to become a kid again when you work with kids. They do crazy stuff.

Somewhere along the way I realized that I enjoyed making useless things a lot more than well-finished products.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

I asked someone once why he liked Jean-Michel's work and why it was being singled out for acclaim, and he said, 'Because it looks like art.' But then again, art doesn't always look like art at first. The way the space shuttle that lifts off doesn't much resemble the space shuttle as it lands.

People who are exposed to great Wonder Woman stories love her. You have to do your best work and get it out there so people can experience it.

It's so much fun trying to channel my inner four-year-old.

The thing about covers that's relatively important to remember is that it doesn't matter how good an artist you are: if you don't have good ideas, the covers don't stand out.

People that are able to think in terms of concepts and offer us valuable forms of art are very exciting to me.

We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.

To me, kids are the greatest audience and the greatest critics in the world.

I think my inner child wants to take over the world.

Secretly, I'm a 5-year-old.

I love looking at pieces of art through the eyes of a child.

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

REPLICA, n. A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original. It is so called to distinguish it from a "copy," which is made by another artist. When the two are mae with equal skill the replica is the more valuable, for it is suppose

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

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.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

People want to know those details. They think it gives them greater insight into a piece of art, but when they approach a painting in such a manner, they are belittling both the artist’s work and their own ability to experience it. Each painting I do says everything I want to say on its subject and in terms of that painting, and not all the trivia in the world concerning my private life will give the viewer more insight into it than what hangs there before their eyes. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, even titling a work is an unnecessary concession.

It was almost like being a child again because you felt like you were in your bedroom and it almost felt like no one was really watching you. So, you were just kind of having a bit of fun on your own doing silly voices in the bedroom.

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.