David Longstreth Quotes

Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

I love Kanye, I love what he does musically, I love his ability to push the envelope.

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience.

I think that Zappa intentionally made his music weird, but did it with intelligence.

It was awesome working with Miley. She's a visionary and she's a creator and has a lot of ideas.

I gotta say, the Catholic Church has churned out a lot of great artists and directors and actors, so if that's all they do, that's fine by me. If they're good at churning out tortured artists, that's great!

If Kanye was not in the equation, I literally wouldn't even be here. His music pushed hip-hop - the man is a master at taking a complex idea and presenting it in a way that is accessible for everyone.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

In my opinion, the true pioneers are those artists who make manifest in their works the new content, the determining characteristics of life in our time.

All artists are crazy.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

Rock and roll has probably given more than it's taken.

That's the thing about being an artist: you never should settle, really.

George Martin looks like Santa Claus, but he's got a wonderfully disturbed mind.

When I look at the five thousand garments and then all this music hall work, I ask myself how I could have done it all. I was a phenomenon!

I feel like David Byrne is a great example of someone who is always in the 'now' moment of music and finding reasons to be excited and always seeing what's special about it.

The brilliance of Jill Soloway is that while some people will give you Season Two, plus 10%, she's just kicked it.

Fellini was a little lofty for a teenage boy, but certainly he was a huge influence.

We don't have to look back at da Vinci's work and Albert Einstein's work and Mozart's work. We're actually living in the time period that David Lynch is creating his art. We're so lucky.

I tend to gravitate toward people who are a bit more eccentric and creative and artistic in some ways. And I like bringing disparate kinds of creative people together to create some great work, even to share points of view on a new direction.

The best of any artist is in their art.