Trevor Paglen Quotes

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

It's wonderful when music is intellectually stimulating. But ultimately it has to be a visceral experience.

I think that music and visual arts can complement themselves nicely. They do different things - the music forces you into a different mood and perspective whilst the visual stuff can engage you in a more direct cognitive manner.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

All art is about appealing to emotion.

My artwork is in order to seduce people into thinking.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

I think that art is an act of violence, and the more emotionally engaged you are in a piece of art, the more violent it feels.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

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.

I'll go and see anything so long as it amuses me, or moves me. If it doesn't do either I want to go home.

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

Perhaps blue, red, and yellow strike the mind more forcibly from there not being any great union between them, as martial music, which is intended to rouse the nobler passions.

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Art should create an experience.

Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

Art disturbs, science reassures.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.