Walead Beshty Quotes

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways.

I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.

The idea of a 'happening' is that there is little distance between the viewer and it, whatever 'it' is. It's an experience that's on-going and evolving.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

I think 21st century should be art without objects.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art.

You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.

Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.

I'd like to work with Damien Hirst.

We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

It's always been performance art, but now it's on a different level.