Maurizio Cattelan Quotes

If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work - then I was never an artist.

Whether I get adequate attention or not, people here do know the work I have been doing systematically and without compromise for over 40 years. I get tired of people making excuses for guys who don't continue the art because they can't make a living.

We put everything we had into this record, just like we do with every other record that we make.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

I like to be around dancers who are totally committed to the art form, totally committed to the men and women around them.

Like Dilip Kumar, I've never run after money but only after good roles and that's why have always rebelled against those directors who wanted me to do buffoonery in the name of comedy.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

Because when you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in their face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you're disrespectful to inspiration, and we as musicians have to inspire people who go to work every day, and they listen to that Beyonce album and they feel like it takes them to another place.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

You really see that the art world bends over for Hollywood sometimes, in this way that is really grotesque, and the other way around doesn't happen, which is too bad, especially if you consider yourself an artist, and that's what you care about, to see the people you admire and think about the most acting weird.

[On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than is the renown of riches.

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.

Just giving the people a great show, leaving it all on the stage. Like when I'm finished I don't want to go home with nothing, I want to leave it all there on the stage, that's what I'm thinking about before I hit the stage.

In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

I want to be a jazzman until the day I die. To help keep that motion, momentum and movement going, for myself, for my students, for the people who hear me. Oh sure, some days you look around at this country and look at the evidence and think, Oh Lord, don't look good. But you keep moving. You gotta keep moving.

Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.

Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

You stand your ground and you perform your art. That's what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.