Artistic Context Quotes

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

Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.

There are just certain realities about our world and I just happen to be creative within it.

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.

More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

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

I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context.

Someone who knows only music, understands nothing about it.

Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.

I think the people who believe that works can and always should be divorced from the context are people who have the privilege to do so.

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs!

My sculpture thrives in the context of the city, interacting with people in the course of their daily lives.

It's easier to make art for a society at a certain point in time with an understanding of what's going on.

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?

Puppets are pure form then ideas for performance come out of that. It's always the form and the visuals and that's why I like to make puppets in a gallery or museum. They're not often in those contexts.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

At a certain time, an artist needs a big retrospective. At other times, they need a more focused exhibition. It's a different story each time; it's about establishing a dialogue.

I like back-stories to music.