St. Lucia Quotes

I'm an experimental artist in a field that doesn't celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.

I've realised that if I aim for a successful record, I probably won't have any success. But if I keep making weird things, then hopefully the audiences will come to us.

You hear ten seconds of a song, and you know it's OutKast. There's a strangeness about it because it's catchy, but it's not just pop for the sake of pop. They're pushing the envelope.

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.

I admire artists who really take risks and aren't afraid to do smaller movies and obscure, abstract things. It would be really cool if my career neared that.

I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.

There's so many things that Kanye does that I agree with and disagree with at times. I just say, 'You're in a different place, and what you're doing is experimental. Nobody's been there in hip-hop.'

I remember John Waters's 'Pink Flamingos,' that was the film where I realized you could do anything you want - there were no boundaries.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.

An artist must be a reactionary

All art is based on non-conformity.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

If you're an artist or someone creative, it's all about cheap rent and not having to work for a living. That's what it's always been about. Unless you're a trust-funder or you somehow score a great part-time job or you work for another artist, you're going to go where you can afford to live.

I am an artist who's just tryin' to do something different, and basically not caring about everybody's opinions and wanting to follow what everybody else is doing. At the same time, I know when to be serious, but I know when to joke.

You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.