Jeff Koons Quotes

I love creating things, especially out of metal. There's something truly satisfying about shaping a piece of metal and seeing the impurities peeling away as you weld it into your chosen design.

Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

In many respects, designing heirloom products means saying no to designing consumer crap that you know will not last very long.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

I am an artisan. I only became an artist when people watch what I do. That is when it becomes art.

Bent metal is worse than bent wood and weight for weight is more flexible.

Often when I talk about what I do, making isn't just this inevitable function tacked on at the end.

I don't fear that a man will wear out as quickly as he will rust out.

Steel is needed everywhere.

A guitar is a guitar. Whether it was made yesterday or 51 years ago, if it's good, it will stand the test of time.

To help my mother, I started working as a workshop helper. There I learned welding and other tools.

I don't design. I don't paint. I absolutely never touch my works.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.

Steel True, Blade Straight.

Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.