Jean Baudrillard Quotes

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

Photographs are interpretations of reality; as such, it is entirely subjective. Most photos are taken with an agenda, to sell something or to make a subject look better than it really is. Think of family snapshots - everyone is smiling and happy.

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?"

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.