Bjarke Ingels Quotes

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

The more far-out artists, the better.

My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

I think there's very little interesting in art that is not transgressive in some way. And I don't think that's a very revolutionary thing to say.

As an artist, I have been a risk-taker. And I've done a lot of different things. I don't make it easy for people. Identification is difficult. One doesn't recognize my art right away.

All art is based on non-conformity.

Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.

When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.

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

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

I know that whatever I put out, whether people think it's pop or noise or whatever, it's always going to be some kind of a freak or mutation. It's not going to be anything pure that a lot of people will relate to. And that's fine.

Punk was such an exciting time because there were no rules. You could go and knock on Sun Ra's door - and he was in the phonebook, under Ra!

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

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.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

I'm an experimental artist in a field that doesn't celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.

Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.