Sigmar Polke Quotes

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.

As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.

Men talk about art, and artists make art, but should artists talk?

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

I don't want to be in an art bubble.

Senator Helms might very well do that. I would point out to him that we in the art world are not necessarily in the business of making controversial art.

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

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.

I find pop art really offensive because it's taking a piece of popular culture and putting it somewhere where people can't see it.

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

Artists don't think archivally.

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

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I've met others [people] who simply responded to me, "You're Kehinde Wiley. I know your work. I saw it at the Brooklyn Museum [Brooklyn, NY] And I'd be honored to be in your work."