Janet Malcolm Quotes

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

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

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

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

No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'.. .I could never see these qualities in paint - I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

Music and acting are the same thing: you must understand that art is only the search, not the final form.

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

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.