Bruce Nauman Quotes

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

The artist is called a creator.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

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?

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

I don't like watching people work if they're making art.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

Making art is different for everyone.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist's psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.

Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.