John Baldessari Quotes

The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.

Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

You see, my ambition was not to confound the engineering world but simply to create a beautiful piece of art.

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

The artist is called a creator.

I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

All men are creative but few are artists.

In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art.

Normal people do not create art.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.