Lori Petty Quotes

Sometimes I think you have to try to do things that people don't think are doable. I remember at the very beginning actually, the first person I had to convince was myself really because there's a self-censorship. When everybody says 'we don't do silent movies anymore,' you agree with everybody, and you say 'yeah, you're right.' It was a fantasy.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Everything I've done hasn't worked out - you know, some things aren't as great as others - but I'm having so much fun, who cares? Isn't that what an artist is supposed to do? We're trying to change the world. Otherwise, why be an artist? You want to shake people up and make 'em think.

Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

For every wacky postcard, there's a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there's one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won't like. I'm just worried that it looks like I've compared my work with Rembrandt. "Gervais says he's better than Rembrandt!".

I think as much as possible, an artist, if he has any kind of social or political concern, has to…expose as much as possible what he sees so that some people think about things that they don’t normally think about… [Art] should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

I'm all about risque - I love that stuff. I love to be creative - that's what the entertainment business is about.

Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.

If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.

I prefer to create friction. Because if you're not pushing buttons, you're just making something pleasant; it's probably been done before, and it's not making anyone feel anything.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

I think that other people covering my work is really exciting... Im really open to that kind of thing because I think interpretation is an art form.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I like to be provocative. I like to make people think. I like to touch people's hearts. And if I can do all three of those things in one fell swoop, then I feel like I've really accomplished something.

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

My work is always a ready-made... cultural, political, or social, and also it could be art - to make people re-look at what we have done, its original position, to create new possibilities.

I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.