Maurizio Cattelan Quotes

I would like beautiful gymnastics to be recognized as the best. I want the judges to appreciate things that are not necessarily winning points.

I am not an artist. I am a craftsman.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

I'm really bad at knowing if something I've done is any good. I can't work it out; I can't be objective about anything I do.

Art is very subjective and having to put numbers on it seems counterintuitive.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

You can be a giant among artists without ever attaining any great skill. Facility is a dangerous thing. When there is too much technical ease the brain stops criticizing. Don't let the hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

There's a great deal of poetry in working out how things work, cutting bits of metal, trying to mend stuff.

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

There's no making art for art's sake. You've got to make the best art you can.

I've always believed that you have to have the skills before you destroy the skills. If you want to be crude, be crude, but don't be crude because you don't know how to do it, because you're not perfect at drawing and pattern-cutting.

In music, you can't really tell who's better.

The challenge is to balance the technical elements and what is required of us with being artists and telling a story.

I think competition in any kind of activity like music, art, literature - anything that's not done with a timer - is actually impossible. So, in effect, what you're doing is you're entering the lottery. You're hoping that you play well (and that) you play your best on the day that you're heard, and you're hoping that the people who are judging will like what you do.

They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

It is all about technique. The great mistake of this century is to put inspiration and creativity first.

As not every instance of similitude can be considered as a proof of imitation, so not every imitation ought to be stigmatised as plagiarism. The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament, may sometimes display so much judgment as will almost compensate for invention; and an inferior genius may, without any imputation of servility, pursue the paths of the ancients, provided he declines to tread in their footsteps.

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.