Frank Iero Quotes

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

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

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them, but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

Sometimes art is just about getting a reaction, that's really the end-all be-all.

A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.

I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process?

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

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 thing that I enjoy about being an actor and the thing that I enjoy about the arts in general is the ability to make the audience feel an emotion that they weren't intending to feel before they went in.

As an artist, I want a reaction.

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

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.