Quotes About Artists

Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art.

The artists could be dead, but some of them are not so distant from us, and make us feel as if they are alive with us. Such artists are worth calling "contemporary artists".

I came at a time where male artists where dominating, so I had to do something quick to get people's attention. I wanted to let people know that women artists can hold their own compare to the men. Sex got their attention, while I open the road for the other female artists.

The music business is suffering because fewer artists are being invested in. Labels are putting in less money, taking fewer risks and signing half as many artists as they did 10 years ago. Everything is risk averse right now and there are two ways to deal with a business situation like this: either reduce your risk or increase your return. They're reducing their risk to the bone and looking for ways with their 360 deals to increase their return. They're still not making money. Artists are suffering. Labels, or music investors, are suffering.

Before I think we was emcees, we was more or less narrators too. Because if you look at the early '80s hip hop, it was so much creativity goin' on with artists like then, like Slick Rick, then you had Rakim, and you had these different kind of artists back then. And we was a marble cake of all these artists. So I didn't have a problem with writin' stories because I felt like that was somethin' I loved to do. Even to this day, I really consider myself an entertainer-slash-narrator. I like to talk about stuff that goes on.

I think what happened in the last 10 or 15 years in the art market is that all the players - and that includes artists, dealers, art advisors, everyone - basically became dealers. We've had old-school collectors morph into speculators, flipping works. We've seen auction houses buying works directly from artists or from sleazy middlemen. The last step before the crash was the artists themselves supplying the auction houses. Dealing themselves, you know? The art world is as unregulated as any financial market there is.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

There are people out there who are into traditional country music and for those people you have artists like Brad Paisley and Josh Turner and Alan Jackson. Then you have artists with a progressive style of country music, like myself and Eric Church and Luke Bryan and Miranda Lambert.

I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

There is a good deal of art that in some traditions of conceptual work are anti-affect, in fact a very large chunk of mainstream art after 1950 took against affect art altogether because they said, "No, we hate affect art because this is how we get manipulated by totalitarianism and therefore artists shouldn't play that game." And a lot of artists agreed to play that game, which I personally believe is to the loss of art.

The breakdown of the modern movement led to what later became known as postmodern-whatever the hell that means-referring to the mixture of people and backgrounds that became a common thing among artists in America. Many of the great artists in America, for example, came from Jewish families and backgrounds that fled all the way from Russia. It's remarkable, the great masters of American art and cinema who were coming from old roots in little villages there. And then Hollywood, and the haunting, hypnotic impact that American Cinema had throughout the world . . .

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

I have to say, that's pretty typical for artists, kind of embarrassingly typical for artists that everything is all about selection.

My greatest passion has always been connecting with creative people, appreciating the artistic and discovering fresh perspectives on the world. I came on board to use my experience in building an international community of photographers, illustrators and video artists at iStockphoto who learned, grew and sold their work to millions around the world. Building a community that large requires personality, a keen sense of what both the contributing artists and the buying audience need, and an ability to balance both. I wanted very much to transfer those skills to the fine art world.

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

A lot of artists make art for five years, some artists make art for ten years, a few make art for fifteen: very few do it until they die.

What's happening in the larger world always influences art. When I first started the gallery in 1959, one of the first things I learned was that most people assume artists know one thing and one thing only - that they were idiot savants. I found very quickly that most artists were very informed and very aware of what was happening in the world around them. So all of those things go together, especially for earthworks. And at that time there was such an intense interest in American art. So there was a great deal of attention paid to where it was going.

I suppose the good artists, the righteous artists, somehow manage to be exuberant, and the embarrassed artist has this idea that everybody has to stop being so excited, which I find so distasteful.

I feel like I've been training my entire career for this moment in a lot of ways. So many artists just want to draw Batman, and I'm getting the opportunity to do the backups in a brand-new Scott Snyder project that has so many artists.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

We artists are hypersensitive, or we wouldn't be - couldn't be - artists.

Artists have been used over and over again since the early 1980s as the legitimizers of a neighborhood in New York. And entrepreneurial artists, meaning people who themselves start out as painters, musicians, dancers, and who open a café, a bar, a restaurant, or even a co-op art gallery - they unintentionally develop the kinds of attractions that bring the middle class with some kind of cultural ambition.

The refusal to be creative is an act of self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we are open to our creativity, we are opening to God: good, orderly direction. As we pursue our creative fulfillment, all elements of our life move toward harmony. As we strengthen our creativity, we strengthen our connection to the Creator within. Artists love other artists. Our relationship to God is co-creative, artist to artist. It is God's will for us to live in creative abundance.

Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.

There's a lot of variety of musicians in Korea. I cannot say they are the best in the world, but I can say that Korean artists are really dynamic artists, so I am going to show that from now on.

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.

I just sit at the drawing board most of the time. I am used to talking to people. I love going to conventions, getting feedback and talking to people. Some artists don't. Some artists sit at their drawing board because their personality actually dictates that.

Artists react to tragedy by doing something both as a way for us as artists to process our pain and our grief and our loss and as a way to give something back and memorialize people that are lost. That always makes it far harder to compartmentalize things. As a species, should never get used to tragedy and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening and to celebrate people loving people. We should all be lucky enough to be loved and to love someone in return. That's what this is about.

As a label I don't care about piracy. I want the music that we [my band] love to be heard by as many people as possible. The more people like the music we put out, the better the label and artists will do. If anyone genuinely likes what we do they will find us, buy our vinyl or come to see the artists play live.

Having more curators to go around among the artists is more effective and more efficient. The artists are better looked after so you get better works. What isn't so effective is actually that some visitors and some members of the press really want a single voice with which they can relate.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

I've always been a firm believer that soul music never dies. The artists we still listen to today, years after their music was first heard are mostly soul artists; Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan. We still sing along to all of them with our hearts.

Canadian artists in Canada, if you're not doing something big internationally, they definitely don't give us super big respect right away. You have to really earn it. In my opinion, that's what makes us Canadian artists stronger. By the time we are out on the world stage, we are so prepared.

I think there are a lot of artists that are very traditional. I think someone can be a fan of someone like Josh Turner and then turn around and be a big fan of someone like Taylor Swift because, at the end of the day, it's all about those songs. I feel like country music has the best songwriting and the best songs of any genre.

I'm not sure I'm going to be that type of artist but I do love cultural icons. Like Solange has been really great at that. Releasing her album end of last year and being really strong in their sound, bands like Little Dragon, artists like James Blake. You know their music when you hear them. They have a really particular sound and it's really cultural and people copy that sound. You hear it in other songs and you're like 'That's a James Blake tune'.

All of the artists did such a beautiful job I can’t thank them enough. I’m just honored that 'God Only Knows' was chosen. 'God Only Knows' is a very special song. An extremely spiritual song and one of the best I’ve ever written.

I always hope that my music can inspire someone, the same way other artists inspire me.

It's tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don't have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it's us - the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.

There was a time when television was sort of frowned upon among people who wanted to be serious artists. John Travolta kind of exploded that. He was one of the actors who made that go away.

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

Europe isn't something connected by the Euro. Every little dimension of Europe is so hugely different, and I think America is different in its states as well, so I never really think of things in big blocks, in terms of other artists.

Artists say that paintings are never done. I sort of feel the same way about music. I would never say something is perfect. There are performances that can generate a lot of emotion in me when I hear them, but I can't say if anything is perfect.

I never quite dare to believe I'm brave enough to be an artist, but I'm on the side of artists. I think of myself as a bit of a Salieri, looking with longing eyes at Mozart.

I like getting my own thoughts out right now, I have fans to solidify, so that's why I don't do tracks with too many younger rappers or newer artists. People may consider me to be a music snob or whatever, but I like to preserve what's mine and I also don't just do tracks to do tracks, I make every song with a purpose.

I have a tendency to think that that stereotype of American movies and Hollywood movies doesn't exist. Of course you have the studios that have a very hard policy upon their artists, but then I haven't really been doing any real Hollywood movie yet.

When I first came to New York, I knew some painters older than myself. I was kind of the kid who was allowed to hang out with them. That is more the way people talked in those days, it was perfectly normal to question a work's fundamental premises and its fundamental visual manifestations. It was perfectly okay to say, "Oh, that should have been red" or something like that. In a funny way, the way artists talk about art is to de-privilege it.

I just want to kind of tackle every kind of form that exists in the comedy world; whether it be stand-up or hidden camera or parody. Kind of slap it in a movie with hip-hop artists and actors, comedians and girls. I just want to do something fun.