Influential Art Quotes

I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

Music is power.

In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.

I just want to reach a point where I have an opportunity to impact the entire world with one song.

Music is powerful.

It's crazy to see people having tattooed my lyrics on their body, and quite frankly writing is just an outlet for my voice and getting it out there.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

The most flattering thing I hear is, 'I didn't think I liked country music before I heard your record.'

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

I think that its an artist's responsibility to have a point of view. Society takes its cue from popular art. People need something to look to, something to provoke them into questioning whether they completely hate something or completely love something.

Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

I would rather say that I have to be not from Los Angeles but from America. When I go to Europe or Asia, I find myself disoriented. I'm not so inspired by their culture as much. It's not going to really come out in my work. I would be more influenced by what somebody from America does - like a sign painter from Pennsylvania.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.

I love to listen to the music that first inspired me - I get that fresh feeling back.