Richard Serra Quotes

The world will see many fashions of art and most of the world will follow the fashions and make none. These cults - these 'movements' - are absolutely necessary, or at any rate their causes are, for somewhere in their centres are the ones who bear the Idea, the ones who have questioned, 'But what do I think?' and 'How shall I say it best?

It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.

People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

It is the death of present art when it returns again and again to the model. Use of the model is only an intermediate stage in artistic development. Create out of a living spirituality to overcome everything naturalistic.

No one expected a first year engineering student to build the perfect bridge.

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

One of the reasons I moved away from painting was because I eventually discovered that I wanted to deal more with motion, time, and performance - and that became a much bigger part of my life both as an actor and as a musician and someone who goes on stage and travels around the world and works on productions.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

Every work of art changes its predecessors.

All music is based in one way or the other, or influenced through the ages, on technology.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.