Boundary-Pushing Art Quotes

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

I'd bought a lot of really challenging, cutting-edge Joel-Peter Witkin photographs very early on. There were severed heads and amputated feet and hands in them - gruesome stuff. I had them all around the house, and if someone couldn't relate to it in some artistic way and instead just said "Yuck," then there probably wouldn't have been anywhere for us to go.

Contemporary art hates you.

I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

My number-one hero in terms of interdisciplinary art is Laurie Anderson, but I've always admired anyone who can think way beyond any one medium.

Some of the most successful artists are the weirdest ones - look at Lady Gaga. I've done shows with her and she's amazing.

When you work with David Lynch, you never know where he's going next and that's exciting. He's like a magician pulling out new tricks.

The picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done.

This act of piss, which can be considered sexual by some, a pleasurable experience, is at the same time total disrespect. I had once asked a friend to do this picture and he totally refused. So I carried the idea around with me for years. When I was invited to do a Honcho shoot, I approached Phillip, who was the barman at The London Apprentice, and fortunately he knew who I was. He had a copy of my first book, and that broke the ice. At the end of the shoot with him, I realized I could ask him to do this picture. I had waited four years to do it.