Art Destruction Quotes

We have destroyed 80 percent of the statues. There is only small amount left and we will destroy that soon.

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.

A lot of the art that was destroyed was painted and created by Jews. A lot of that is gone because that was degenerative art. That's what Hitler was trying to get rid of.

Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

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

It's impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won't. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I'd picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn't like the attention.

All art of the past must be destroyed.

I want to assassinate painting.

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

Do not help the quick moneymakers who have delusions about taking possession of classics by smearing them with paint.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.

Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroy'd it; a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make.

Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

Sultan Beyazid considered his father's art collection decadent and ordered it sold at auction.

The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is... it's the scene with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first 'Batman,' the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.