David Maisel Quotes

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

Black and white means photography to me. It's much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I really want to make something that makes people think. I love that movie 'Tiny Furniture' that Lena Dunham made. I just love that movie, and I laugh at that movie a lot, but I also felt a lot too. I'm just inspired by people like that.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

I'm always concerned about growing as an artist.

One is never done growing as an artiste. So, it's important to find roles that challenge me and make me learn new things.

There are some millennial artists that I totally get and understand, and I know what they're talking about. People who I've worked with and who I'd like to work with. But there's a whole element of artists that I can't explain what they're talking about.

I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.

I think that's the key to any artistic endeavor: You want it to feel fresh and not have people look at it like it's re-creation of something else unless it's done in a really strong way.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

I think, as an artist I done conquered every way that you can go, as far as with creativeness, and directions and love, and you pissed off or, your happy.

There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful.

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.