Ben Eine Quotes

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.

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

Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

I'm a massive fan of Brit Art in general and Damien Hirst in particular. I think he's an absolute genius and should be celebrated in every way.

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.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

I am just an artist.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.

Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

I'd like to work with Damien Hirst.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

Ray Johnson was a great innovator of mail art and photocopying and sending people photocopies.

I think Damien Hirst is hilarious. And I think he's a true artist. He's not hilarious first; I think he is a real artist, and I also think he's got an amazing sense of humor.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

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

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

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

'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.

I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house.

'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

If you want to look at a cheap shot, look at Mr. Koons's or Mr. Gober's art. By no definition is it art.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.