Billy Al Bengston Quotes

I want to put concepts in front of people that make them laugh or smile or even hate what I do. I'm not interested in just putting clothes in stores.

I have always been interested in having people fall into the image and be aware of their reaction first, and then think about the style.

Right now as an artist, what I want to do is be a part of works that are unignorable. I couldn't be less interested in how people receive it, honestly. As long as it's unignorable.

I'd like to think that most of what I do is self-evident if you're listening to it or seeing it. But I don't mind the fact that it's hard to describe.

When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.

I don't want to paint rainbows: I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority.

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

All good art is an indiscretion.

I just don't ever want it to be nice. I'd prefer someone had a violent reaction to my collection than ever call it 'nice.'

I believe that films are meant for entertainment, but in that process, you have the possibility to think about what kind of entertainment you're giving to audiences.

I feel like you have to make art because you have to make it. But the end result of it- that last stage- you have to show it to somebody else to hopefully get a rise or reaction out of them- [to see] if it’ll affect someone else.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely

It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.

I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.

I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.

There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.