Jean Dubuffet Quotes

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines. There's not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think.

If I am not mistaken, the word "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.

there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.

The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

Objective art is just the opposite. The man has nothing to throw, he is utterly empty, absolutely clean. Out of this silence, out of this emptiness, arises love, compassion, and out of this silence a possibility for creativity. This silence, this love, this compassion, these are the qualities of meditation.

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

art, n. This word has no definition.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no line between high art and pop art, and there should be no line.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! . . ."