Carl Andre Quotes

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I can't believe that 100% of the people who stand in art galleries looking at art are thinking, 'Well, here I am, looking at art.' They must be having some sort of other, unselfconscious experience.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

As soon as something becomes art I think you get over the fear

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.