David Elliott Quotes

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

I sometimes am challenged to imagine where the timbre of art should be. Should it be about objects that point to this current moment, or how objects are related to ideas of this current moment?

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

I think design is the expression of its time and culture.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

I think when people talk about art imitating life, you're in real time.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.