Quotes About Artists

I was worried that I, the artist Morimura, would have conflicts with the participating artists and develop a strenuous relationship with them. But the actual experience was completely the opposite. The artists accepted my requests rather positively, because it came from a fellow artist. I strongly feel that the fact that my being an artist avoided the usual curator vs artist tension, and led to creating a positive atmosphere as well as developing a solidarity amongst artists and building a community for artists.

Vulnerability of artists is definitely what makes organizations like PEN necessary because, as I tried to argue, the actual work that writers and artists do has an ornery way of surviving. Particularly in this age of the internet, it is very easy for forbidden work to be found online somewhere if you know where to look. Artists themselves, however, are in increasing danger, and not just artists. The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work.

A lot of artists have been persuaded into doing whatever they can do to gain attention. The media, of course, will position and promote the worst of them to the front page. The sidewalk to crime becomes the marketing campaign. These artists have seen it work and sell millions and millions of records for other artists.

Regular people don't even realize how much artists mean to them. Artists represent a lot to the average person. People listen to music all day on their iPods, so as artists, we become a real fixture in people's lives. As an artist, you can't take it personal. It's like your big brother teasing you.

I find artists like Tim Barry, Cory Branan, and Jenny Owen Youngs, these current artists that are doing what they're doing now are my idols, my generation's incredible songwriters. I've listened to so much music on the whole ride and I'm inspired by a lot of classic artists, but it's the people right next to me singing songs that are blowing my mind, if that makes any sense.

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.

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.

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.

I don't know how comic artists feed their families, if they do. But it's a fascinating form and so I think that after a long period of nothing happening and work, nothing very impressive, we are into another golden age of comics. Unfortunately, it's not a golden age for the artists themselves economically. I don't know how they get along.

As long as artists can make something, artists will continue to survive.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

To be able to make decisions and see them come to fruition and feel the excitement around them, what it generates within the company, how the artists get motivated — that's the most rewarding part; feeling I can be a catalyst for an artistic experience for our artists and for the public.

A lot of young artists in particular think you can just do one great thing and then sit back and collect checks. Most artists, even people like Dan Clowes, who's one of my heroes, don't just do comics. He does paid illustration. He writes screenplays, and so forth, working and selling lots of different things.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story."

What do great artists do when you see a world around you that's in turmoil? Some of the best artists make you feel good (hah), they look to the future.

I think that watching artists, soulful artists, they get into it. It's always the way I perform, so when I'm on stage I just try to get into it - I'm in my own world. That's the whole thing about the stage, it's like a sacred place. They're [the audience] watching into the different world, right, so it's like you see performers and they're in the same room, so it's a different vibe. Sometimes it's great, but I try to separate it, you know, I wanna separate it 'cos otherwise I feel naked. It just feels natural.

Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It's been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt. But I suppose that's okay. For artists, everything is grist for the mill. Artists are like cockroaches; we can't be stamped out.

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.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

I guess with the generation we live in, we just want to be entertained at the end of the day. A lot of artists make themselves accessible, so they feel like every artist should be like that. Some artists shouldn't be so accessible, to me.

Laborers want their kids to be merchants or business people. Business people want their kids to be professionals. Professionals want their kids to be academics, professors. Academics want their kids to be artists. And artists don't care if their kids are laborers or not. They can be anything.

I would have conversations with European artists. Meaning, people look at my painting and one person would say, "Oh, your painting is just like so-and-so!" Another person would say, "It's just like so-and-so." But at the end, it's a chain of relay like a marathon. There are so many so-and-so's that eventually it becomes mine. My dialogue was completely European, with the '40s, '50s, '60s artists, but on the exterior side I do big painting. It's post-Pollock. It's current. It's a meeting of the time. The Chinese side just comes out.

Art feeds off art...and artists feed off artists.

Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

We had Chinese artists that would put in elements for the Chinese audience like the calligraphy actually means something so the audience when they read it they'll understand. So there were definitely little things we were able to do that specifically leveraged the artists' talents.

If some people are right, artists are put into this world not to practice their art, but to talk about it. And judging by the flattering invitations many a humble climber will receive to pontificate from the lowest rung but one of the ladder, humanity is in a dangerously receptive frame of mind, and artists a race devoid of either modesty or sense of humor.

The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Mixtapes are extremely important, especially for New York or North East artists. They allow you to be creative, to get feedback and criticism, but most of all, it gets your name out there. I would say about 90-100% of my success was down to the mixtapes.

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'.

Even though Hubbard is dead, his business still repeats his lies, ... and in my opinion the proposed Act should also punish businesses and organizations that repeat such falsehoods. It is a gross insult to American men and women who have actually been wounded and who have actually earned the medals and awards that frauds and con-artists falsely claim.

Managers all over the world will go crazy when their artists are not touting the party line and making things pretty in the way that they're supposed to, but it's different when your manager is your husband. It's contrary to your soul. That commercial interest presses in upon your whole personal life.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

These are dangerous days we live in and you, the artists, are our last defense.

The impresario's job is to pick the right people who can pick the right people. He picks the people who can pick artists and relate to them. People who know what the market craves.

As Colin Wilson has written, "modern civilisation, with its mechanised rigidity is producing more outsiders than ever before-people who are too intelligent to do some repetitive job, but not intelligent enough to make their own terms with society." Those "intelligent enough" to make their own terms with society are what we will later refer to as artists of life. The outsider views himself as a product of a culture he rejects-the artist views himself as a culture-builder.

Artists are taught to be humble about their impact, especially in folk music. It's so ingrained that I have a hard time even thinking I had any impact other than what a normal hit song would have.

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.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

I think that some of the writing, directing, and the content is better than a lot of movies sometimes. Actors, well artists in general - actors, writers, directors - what we all care about the most is good work and being able to create something that is really resonant and meaningful.

The darling schemes and fondest hopes of man are frequently frustrated by time. While sagacity contrives, patience matures, and labor industriously executes, disappointment laughs at the curious fabric, formed by so many efforts, and gay with so many brilliant colors, and, while the artists imagine the work arrived at the moment of completion, brushes away the beautiful web, and leaves nothing behind.

I had thirty weeks of prep on 'Captain America.' I have a small team of qualified, supportive, creative producers who are actually helping me achieve my vision of the film. I had a dream cast headed by Chris Evans. I had the best designers, artists, sculptors, craftspeople.