Rachel Kushner Quotes

Everybody's an art critic.

I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art.

The way you would know if someone is famous in the art world is that you would ask your mother. My mother knows who Picasso was. She knows who Warhol was.

Great art must proceed to precision and brevity. It presupposes the alert mind of an educated listener who, in a singleact of thinking, includes with every concept all associations pertaining to the complex.

I have 12 paintings of Kaufman art. He is an amazing artist.

It’s like saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder: what appears to be beautiful today may not be judged beautiful in a few years. A perfect example is the Warhol ‘Marilyn’; in the 1960s it was deemed garish. Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn’t mean having read a few art history books.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world and I don't know whether fancy being slagged off by the literary world as well. It's just too much.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.

My real father was a portrait painter. I went to a lot of auctions as a kid and galleries.

The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

There are so few people who can really take hold of art and sort of eat and chew it up. Somehow it's got to be held special, sacred in a corner, and if you don't do the same thing with it, if you're not equally reverential, serious, and pompous about it, well, then you're not a great artist. Who needs that?

If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

It's almost a social grace to get into the art world, and I'm very wary of it. Art was good in Berlin in the late '70s - there was a lot more guts to art when the Neo-Expressionists were starting up; it was real slapdash; it has real heart to it - but it seems so cold and heartless in America. It's a buyer's market.

I grew up in the art world.

Not only was Tupac an iconic figure in Hip-Hop, he was an iconic artist across the whole world. He transcends to all races. And everybody loved him. It's just his honesty. Good or bad, had to love him.

So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first-and all this for trifles that no man really needs!

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.