Artistic Norms Quotes

My parents are artists; in their world, in the world of modern artists, you are supposed to just go into your studio and tune everything out, and your entire relationship with your work is supposed to be a super private one. That was the way to do it and you weren't deeply truly artistic if that wasn't the way you were engaging the press.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

I don't think I live the lifestyle that's expected of a quote unquote R&B artist. I'm just not that dude.

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

I didn't fit the mold of a popstar.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

There are clear differences between child and adult artistic activity. While the child may be aware that he is doing things differently from others, he does not fully appreciate the rules and conventions of symbolic realms; his adventurousness holds little significance. In contrast, the adult artist is fully cognizant of the norms embraced by others; his willingness, his compulsion, to reject convention is purchased, at the very least, with full knowledge of what he is doing and often at considerable psychic cost to himself.

The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.'

My studio is not arty. It doesn't smell of turpentine, and I'm not knee-high in paper.

I come from a culture where you don't divide it up to what you can do on TV and what you can do on film.