Sherrie Levine Quotes

Maybe I should see things as they really are and not as I want them to be.

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.

I wanted to make pictures that contradicted themselves. I wanted to put one picture on top of another so that there were times when both pictures disappear and other times when they were both manifest. That vibration is basically what the work was about for me - that space in the middle where there is no picture, rather an emptiness, an oblivion.

It is something that artists do all the time unconsciously, working in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that relationship literal.

Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged.

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash.