Barry McGee Quotes

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.

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.

As an artist, I understand that, and I value the creative input of the artist.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

There can be no 'graduated exercises in drawing' leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

Greedo is one of the most important California artists of our generation.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.