Roger Corman Quotes

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.

Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.

There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise. As an actor, you're giving it up, you're at the mercy of so many other people.

I honestly think I could sit down and write a show tonight that the critics would love, and I know it would be canceled within four weeks. I know what the critics love. We write and produce for people, not for critics.

There's obviously nothing wrong with selling your art - only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it's confusing to know how far you should take it.

People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.

You have got to have an agent. It's a business. But I think there is a way to be artful and commercial at the same time.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

I have respect for those who make money at art and do it well and smartly, because that commercial aspect keeps the world going and running, in a sense.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

I want to show that you can be just as amazing as labels and compete as a business and work as a business even though you're an artist.

You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.

I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations - that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, 'Your work is so commercial.'

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

Didacticism is the death of art.

And it's possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.

The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.