Commercial Art Quotes & Sayings

The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now. — John Waters

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned. — Camille Paglia

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?
Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority? — Frank Lloyd Wright

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder's widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn's museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: "Our stuff looks tinny compared to it." At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society's most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever. — Martin Filler

Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot. — Barbara Kruger

I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art. — Helen Mirren

We both [with Jo Andres] think that it is really important to our culture that we support all kinds of music, all kinds of theatre and all kinds of art because you never know what moves people. We've always believed that there should be a strong voice outside the commercial world. Certainly, the commercial world has a huge place in our culture and we also support that - but, we also want to support the stuff that lives outside of that. — Steve Buscemi

The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market. — Tino Balio

The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions. — Gerhard Richter

It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own. — Raymond Pettibon

I have an exclusive gallery that takes care of the all of my artworks. I want to stay focused on the art and of creating and let my gallery take care of the more commercial aspects. — Invader

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class. — Ida Tarbell

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They're epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity. — Virginia Heffernan

I love games. I honestly can't imagine working with any other medium. I guess it would be akin to an artist who's doing commercial art and then goes into education, but it really frees you up to do all other kinds of creative stuff. — Brenda Brathwaite

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art. — Michael Heizer

anyway and have racks of them in the shop. Sammy would help her by pointing her in the right direction for selling her art. Sammy knew all the commercial art — Jennie Jones

Listen closely. There's a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don't give a damn if my work is commercial or not ... I'm the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That's why literature exists. An author puts his heart and guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself. — John Fante

Commercial art is traditionally delivered to a client in a brown-paper bag with an invoice stapled to the outside. — Brad Holland

I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction. — Raymond Pettibon

In my own opinion, the average American's cultural shortcomings can be likened to those of the educated barbarians of ancient Rome. These were barbarians who learned to speak--and often to read and write--Latin. They acquired Roman habits of dress and deportment. Many of them handily mastered Roman commercial, engineering and military techniques--but they remained barbarians nonetheless. They failed to develop any understanding, appreciation or love for the art and culture of the great civilization around them. — J. Paul Getty

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. — David Foster Wallace

Art isn't only a painting; it's anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion. — Seth Godin

I've really only had one (dream) since I got into this business at 13 years old, which was to be in this business forever. Once I did my first television commercial, I caught that itch and that bug. I want to be a part of pieces of art - as far as cinema is concerned - that people will want to see for generations to come. That's my dream. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public. It has to be for oneself. — Vittorio De Sica

Having previously graduated from a 2-year commercial arts class, I thought that commercial illustration was the best way to make a living doing art. But the more tattoos that I did, the more I realized what artistic career potential tattooing had and I enjoyed it. — William Webb

It is said that anyone who does commercial cinema is not acting, and anyone who does an art film is acting. I don't believe it. I feel whenever you are doing a film, you are acting. So you need to be applauded for that. I won't do art house cinemas. I want to make commercial films. I want my films to make money. — Bipasha Basu

Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas. — Chip Kidd

I was in college, and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time, it seemed the thing I really wanted to do, production design, just wasn't available in the U.K., so I turned to music. — Eric Burdon

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues. — Ellen Willis

Saturday morning cartoons do that now, where they develop the toy and then draw the cartoon around it, and the result is the cartoon is a commercial for the toy and the toy is a commercial for the cartoon. The same thing's happening now in comic strips; it's just another way to get the competitive edge. You saturate all the different markets and allow each other to advertise the other, and it's the best of all possible worlds. You can see the financial incentive to work that way. I just think it's to the detriment of integrity in comic strip art. — Bill Watterson

The best test for measuring LDL particles is the NMR Lipoprofile test from Liposcience in Raleigh, North Carolina. NMR is the acronym for "nuclear magnetic resonance" and it is the best commercial lab test using this state-of-the-art technology to determine the nature of your LDL particles - whether they are mostly the large, fluffy Pattern A kind (the good ones) or the small, dense Pattern B type (the bad ones). Your LDL-P number is far more relevant to heart health than your LDL-C will ever be. — Jimmy Moore

I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they'd say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own. — Andy Warhol

The Internet - its beauty is that it's a self-perfecting organism, right? But as long as it's an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect commercial interest, to perfect the art of the listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated oracle, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer. You've — Krista Tippett

Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade. — Henry Fuseli

I love to design. I am a commercial fashion designer. I always design jackets with two sleeves. I don't design jackets with three sleeves, or the layers and layers come off like little dolls from Russia. Fashion for me is a creative endeavor, but it is not art for me. — Tom Ford

I'm for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction. — Andy Warhol

All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it. — Mike Nichols

In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue
by reason and by banging the table
for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications. — John Gardner

Evolving Culture, Reality, as we perceive it, is largely shaped by the artifacts, both material and symbolic, of thought, thought that leads to creative manifestation in form and color. With that in mind, it might be suggested that the visual artist, - from commercial designer to fine art painter - has much to do with most things that enter your everyday visuals, and thus form a major portion of one's reality and, certainly, how this culture manifests and evolves. — Robert Venosa

In bluntest terms, art museums risk being commercial institutions in which art is subsumed by economics and the experience of looking at art becomes a form of consumption. — Amy Whitaker

My forever mission is to take the best elements of both commercial and independent films and bring them together. I learned so much about the art of independent films and I have so much fun in commercial ones. I think that a mix of both is good. — Michael B. Jordan

Playing live is a lost art, and you don't see a lot of bands that go out and play the way the older bands do. It's a celebration, and a lot of people treat it like a commercial or a distraction. — Corey Taylor

People think you can get out your canvas and paint any time you have a free moment. You can't. Commercial art and painting are entirely different. Painting takes a different mental approach. You have to get the right attitude, the right mood. — Pierre Alechinsky

One clear difference between art and commercial work is that commercial work is exploitive: the work may be high quality but the intention is to sell product or tickets. Art exists with or without ticket sales. — Twyla Tharp

The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice of those arts that isn't very pleasant. It used to be that a poet like Tennyson could keep his house and his coach-and-four and his staff of six servants on the income from poetry. That doesn't happen anymore. — William Monahan

I have respect for those who make money at art and do it well and smartly, because that commercial aspect keeps the world going and running, in a sense. — Tina Weymouth

Films are an art form which are sold after packaging in this commercial world — Shahrukh Khan

I'm a commercial artist, both in music and art. — Grace Slick

The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius? — John Kenneth Galbraith

A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings ... it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy. — Nan Goldin

My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way ... People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it's really the position of line that's important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it. — Roy Lichtenstein

It is my first preference to do films with social significance. Art cinema has given me credibility and status as an actor, but commercial cinema has given me a comfortable living. — Om Puri

It's not my concern to make a commercial pop record. I want to make a record of music that I would listen to, that is lyrically rich and has songs that people can relate to - more along the Jakob Dylan route: people who create for the art of it and not necessarily the monetary rewards of it. — Crystal Bowersox

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds. — William Blake

Anything that's really good, everybody wants to put their hands on. The multimedia puts their hands on it and everything happens that makes it global. Then people forget the roots of it and people forget why they care about it, and then it gets torn apart and turns so commercial that you don't even know what the essence of this art form is even about. — Nas

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean. — James Franco

'Commercial' is not the word that has to be said only by CEOs. It has to be something that is maybe the essence of design, because design has some sort of art in it and creation, but it's also some object that you have to use. There is also this pragmatic end to it. — Alber Elbaz

I guess I'm part of the art house, but we really have to shake up our ideas, because we're kind of self-parodying ourselves. We go places commercial cinema doesn't go, but sometimes it's to our own detriment. — Peter Mullan

In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept ... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss ... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand. — R. O. Blechman

Van Gogh would've sold more than one painting if he'd put tigers in them. — Bill Watterson

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater. — Jon Favreau

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias. — Susan Sontag

I don't like differentiating between art and commercial cinema. — Deepika Padukone

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays. — William Monahan

I think bad movies are made around the world, not just in Hollywood. There are as many bad art films in the whole world as there are bad commercial films. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

From that night on, the electron-up to that time largely the plaything of the scientist-had clearly entered the field as a potent agent in the supplying of man's commercial and industrial needs ... The electronic amplifier tube now underlies the whole art of communications, and this in turn is at least in part what has made possible its application to a dozen other arts. It was a great day for both science and industry when they became wedded through the development of the electronic amplifier tube. — Robert Andrews Millikan

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great. — Ikue Mori

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. — John Lennon

Actually, Wilson's art can't fit into these neat categories. My own take is that the best way to think of Wilson is as an outsider musician, but one who actually happens to have a huge amount of talent. Much like, say, Wesley Willis, Wilson is focussed on having huge commercial success, but has little to no idea what actually counts as commercial. He's very easily swayed by people around him, so if he's told he should be doing three-minute pop songs, he does three-minute pop songs, and if he's told he should do epic suites about the American Dream, he does those. But at all times there are two things that remain true about him: he has an unerring ability as an arranger, and a directness that makes his music more communicative than any other music I've ever heard. — Andrew Hickey

Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics. — Virginia Postrel

And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater. — Tony Kushner

I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way. — Roy Lichtenstein

I don't make a division between an art film and commercial art. — Joe Wright

It's an extreme to go from an artist like myself to a commercial artist with art directors looking over your shoulder, or any other knucklehead telling you what your art should look like. — Raymond Pettibon

People talk about making art films - experimental films. I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What's difficult is to combine a commercial film with art. — Carlo Ponti

Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art. — Leonard Baskin

The tensions are always based on financial resources. Something like film is very problematic because it is viewed as an art form and also as an industry with a pure commercial base. — Ann Macbeth

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art. — Kailash Kher

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art. — Andy Warhol

I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left there, I suppose after about five or six years, I then went to the other extreme and started telling to me what seemed to me at the time the ultra-truth about the world around me - social life, and the politicians, and so forth. — Gerald Scarfe

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. — Mark Twain

People want to make a distinction between what's commercial and what's art. — Kathleen Kennedy

I'm done with girls on rocks! I've painted them for thirteen years and I could paint them and sell them for thirteen more. That's the peril of the commercial art game. It tempts a man to repeat himself. it's an awful thing to get to be a rubber stamp. I'm quitting my rut now while I'm still able. — Maxfield Parrish

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery. — Jeff Koons

There was a little optometrist shop on south Broadway tucked in between a pizza joint and what amounted to a head shop where you could buy glow-in-the-dark posters, bongs, and whatever else the hippies began marketing after they went commercial in the '70s ... I had never visited the optometrist shop. The entrance had a 1930s look that I liked - art deco molded-tin awning over the doorway, and Bakelite tiles on the foyer walls. It looked like the kind of business that would be owned by an elderly optometrist who had serviced families for generations and personally ground lenses in his back room. I liked the look of the shop, but I drove right past it on my way to Sight City!!! where you could buy Two Pair for the Price of One!!! according to the billboards plastered all over Denver blocking every decent view of the Rocky Mountains. — Gary Reilly

Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. — Edward Ruscha

Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government. — Rondal Partridge

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre]. — Edward Albee