Marina Abramovic Quotes

What is art but a way of seeing?

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I've had moments when I've thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there's some vibration, some connection.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I want my fans to understand that what you put into the universe is what you get back.

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

As soon as you stop thinking about them, they'll send you a text message or call you. Because they know you stopped thinking about them. It's like a radar.