I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.
'Performance' gave me doubts about my way of life. Before that, I had been completely involved in the more bawdy side of the film business. But after that, everything changed.
When you're an artist, you have a platform that can reach millions.
There's no single movement out there. It's not like in the '60s, when Revolver came out and that's just it for the next year.
The best art is either political or revolutionary....Those things that are powerfully revolutionary are not always successful in the market place.
My family knew I was gay when I was 15, long before I got famous. But it's a very different thing coming out to your family and coming out to the universe. That's a big step. Maybe without me, there wouldn't be Adam Lambert. Without Bowie, there wouldn't be me. Without Quentin Crisp, there wouldn't have been Bowie. So everything is part of a big daisy chain.
At the end of the day, the Grammys are about recognizing genres that are making an impact.
In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.
I didn't realize how much harm I was doing back then and I think a lot of rap artists probably don't realize it now. I said a lot of stuff fooling around back then, and I saw it do a lot of harm.
I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.
Some of the best records are the ones that really affect you the most - they're pure emotion and energy, and it's like you're in that person's brain. It's pretty cool.
The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
I was comparatively late in understanding Bob Dylan's overwhelming importance as a songwriter. Everybody who does my job exists in the shadow of Bob Dylan. There are two categories: Dylan and everybody else. It's as simple as that. And it's going to be that way until he dies.
Art is subjective and, as an artiste, if our artistic work is not appreciated by the majority, it hurts.
Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.
I appreciate this moment in time...ball players and actors be knowing my rhymes
The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
People say I'm destroying hip-hop, and I'm like, there's so much hip-hop, and it's so popular, so I don't know why I have the power to destroy it.
I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.
I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
