David Blaine Quotes

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

Anne Imhof is a powerful artist from Germany making work that is totally interdisciplinary.

On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

I love performing. I love being a provocateur. I love putting myself in situations that are uncomfortable and that I have to get out of.

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

I think if you want to make a performance authentic, there are a certain amount of leaps of faith into the unknown that you have to take. Otherwise, you're not really risking anything. I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

I keep a band of great young people around me, and we're not musically restrained. It's not about 'Let's do it correct' but 'Let's do it right.'

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

I think that Damien Hirst putting a shark in a bath of formaldehyde is nothing.

Mars Volta was always about embracing what 'too much' was and the excess of it. I never thought there would be an audience for it.

Californian artists are kind of willing to push the limits a little bit further just because that's kind of our mentality in that state.

So much about getting onstage is creating a connection with an audience that allows you to go different places and try different things.

Radiohead showed a real affinity to being bold with visual imagery, so it came as no surprise when Jonny Greenwood did 'There Will Be Blood.'