Jeff Koons Quotes

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it.

There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

Museums are for dead artists. I'd never show my work in the Tate. You'd never get me in that place.

I was always confident in my art and in myself as an artist.

When I was making my debut as an artist, I felt that it was very important that I try to combine the background of my own culture, my people, and the country into the contemporary art world. So that's how I came up with the term 'superflat.'

In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.

I always knew I was gonna be an artist. I was very confident in that.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age.

Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate.

A lot of abstract painters seem to be doing everything all at once now. And so these different styles are jibing and not so jibing, and they're clashing. But they all seem to be working in their own domain. Whereas back in the '60s, man, it was kind of a dull world. It was a vital world. But it was kind of contained and not too recognized by the public. Now art is absolutely recognized by the public.

As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

Precocious and eccentric are okay. But I think that people in the arts represent something integral and kind of secretive in everybody else. So the reason people like some artists is because they're saying or doing something that they would like to do or say, but they don't have the balls or the means. People are really afraid to put their ass on the line. Just to put your face on a poster and put your name in big print and say "Come see me," that takes some cojones, you know? Ambition is nothing to be ashamed of.

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.

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.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.

I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.