Paul Gauguin Quotes

In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Art must take reality by surprise.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.

When I made 'Tales of Tacobella,' and I made 'Sugar Trap,' it was like people literally trying to say that like, either that they made it, or that they helped make it, and then they continued to try to steal the flow, try to steal the aesthetic of everything I tried to build.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

I always talk about if you want to be an artist, you have to be authentic because people can tell bullshit a mile away. There is nothing wrong with creating a character, standing behind that character, and that being an authentic performance piece, because that's a piece of art as well. But if you want to be an artist in any form, you have to know to come with it.

Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils