Artistic Obscurity Quotes

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

I was aware of all the artists who make good debut records over the years, but no one hears them - and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen in my case.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I'm one of those artists that nobody ever sees coming. We started with Virgin in 1993. If you look at the climate of that time in reggae and you were to pick the top five people that'd have a shot at having mainstream success, I was nowhere in that equation at all.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity.

The tricky thing is music is supposed to be very mysterious; the way it's made is mysterious. Then people like to get upset with the music business.

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.

What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.

Sometimes I'm fascinated with how famous my work could be while I'm not so famous.

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium.

I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, 'That's just that ole blues singer.'

All my good movies, nobody sees.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

Music looks very formidable to people outside of it and it looks like it's this realm of spooky genius.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?

There is a very difficult period in a comedian's career - it's that window of time where you're good enough to draw tickets but nobody knows you yet.

Some of the greatest films and television have only been seen by the people that make them. And some of the greatest music is only heard by the people who make it.

If only the people around you know you're an artist, then you're doing something wrong.

God and other artists are always a little obscure.