Wolfgang Tillmans Quotes

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

But I'm real conscious about what I do. I don't care what the label is. I'm looking at the outcome of it.

I don't want to do films for the fun of it.

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

I feel like it's very important that I'm doing what I'm doing, and I want to keep honoring that and try and do it as honestly as I can.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

You only have so much time in life so everything you do needs to mean something to you.

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Therefore, be honest with yourself as to why you are choosing to do a particular thing. Then, do it gladly, knowing that you are always getting to do what you want. The statement "I have no choice" is a lie. You can choose. You simply do not prefer the alternatives available to you, for whatever reason. So you select the outcome that you most prefer.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

I don't know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice.

By becoming a conscious choice-maker, you begin to generate actions that are evolutionary for you.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

B.O.Y. means ‘Beware of You’… Be aware of your power. We have the choice to live positively or in our own destruction.

I don't want to do action that doesn't mean anything. Everything I do I want to have character development and three-dimensional characters, fallible humans, and this is definitely one of them.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

You can never be happy until you understand why you're doing what you're doing.

I have to make what I see, whether it's a painting, a table, or a movie, or it's like a death and what would be the point of that?

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.

Yes, there are billions more photographers, and billions more photographs every day, but who's building up a point of view? Who's photographing with intention, and whose body of work will sustain itself and survive?

I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

Whenever you notice your thoughts detour into attack mode, say out loud or to yourself: Happiness is a choice I make.