Artistic Labels Quotes

If people are talking about you, that's great. You start making more money, that's great. You get to go to weird places, that's great. The music industry is weird, especially with the Internet. People are calling you all kinds of weird stuff, like 'jangly.'

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, orKnights oftheIsoscelesTriangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another.

I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

There's been enough building of fences with labels trying to categorize artists, limiting artists' ability to be themselves.

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me.

Genres are just names.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.