Unintentional Art Quotes

Art need not be intended. It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence.

I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

Me making music happened not even from a desire to make records.

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn't work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

What's very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.

Photography is an accident.

Generally, it's all of this subconscious stuff. I didn't even know what Lizzobangers was about until it was mastered and I got to listen to it.

For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.

When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.

The thing I'm obsessed with is really great bad paintings. I have a storage locker full of them and I want to give them their own museum. You don't even know who these artists are - you can buy them at garage sales, antique stores and places like that. They're brilliant because they were done with the intention of being great, but the artist sort of made a wrong turn. Some of them are hilarious and I can't get enough of them.

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.

I had no choice. It was just something that happened. I was always looking for ways to act out, and I got a camera and it acted out for me.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

I think that the things that are interesting sometimes, when you're striving for a sound, you just get it wrong 'cause of your own limitations. That's when you get something kind of original.

I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't think there was any reason to.

Genuine music, to me, is the one which has no purpose. It should be as natural and as purposeless as the flow of the river.

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.