Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed.

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.

I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

Success is a worn down pencil.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.

If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.

An empty canvas is full.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.

I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.