Glenn Ligon Quotes

There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Fine art is really something I want to get into.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

I've always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.

I want to work in art forever.

I've always been a creative person, and I'd always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.

An art book is a museum without walls.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.