Quotes & Sayings About Conceptual Art

I'm not trying to do conceptual art. — Peter Sotos

I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years. — David Salle

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. — Damien Hirst

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art. — Neil Farber

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art. — William H Gass

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers. — Andrei Codrescu

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater. — Tim Crouch

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras. — Leonard Nimoy

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. — Jerry Saltz

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art. — Sol LeWitt

I always thought there was a - even in the most, quote, "conceptual art," there is always a physical aspect to it. I never knew what the term meant. — Robert Barry

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio. — Harold Rosenberg

Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy. — Luis Camnitzer

What art is not processed? "Conceptual art." Somebody making a painting has to conceive of the size. I don't understand where these words came from. I can't accept the fact that the concept of art as our concept of humanity is expanding. — Lawrence Weiner

I have little interest in illustration, which lacks a kind of transcendental quality. It is too literal. I find typography more straightforward, conceptual, and appealing, with its strict geometric vocabulary. There is a bridge between typographic design and fine art, especially since typography possesses a complex subtlety. The idea, the method, and the honesty in expression are central to a designer who works with type. — Timothy Samara

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. — David Sedaris

The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light. — Luigi Ghirri

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something. — Kim Gordon

Passing from legality to subversion, the need of finding a minimum stimulus with a maximum effect appears - an effect that through its impact justifies the risk taken and pays for it. During certain historical periods, at the level of the object, this meant dealing with and creating mysteries. At the level of situations, and in this case, it means the change of social structure. — Luis Camnitzer

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division. — Michael Craig-Martin

All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually. — Joseph Kosuth

I thought conceptual art was a joke. — Gian Carlo Menotti

In fact I always disliked conceptual art, because my work is about anarchistic humor. — Dan Graham

I am good in the fact that most of my reviews have been very positive really. I get pretty good reviews. There have been some that aren't - critical. I think they are extremely - the people that wrote them really don't understand what they are looking at quite frankly or have a very preconceived notion of what conceptual art should be or where I am at or the fact that I may change what I have done from what I did 20 years ago. But there is always some reason that they just sort of get it wrong. And so it certainly doesn't affect my work. — Robert Barry

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school. — Kyp Malone

I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes. — Will Self

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work — Sol LeWitt

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good. — Sol LeWitt

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting. — Paul Simonon

The canvas isn't empty. It's full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don't even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it. — Jarod Kintz

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual. — Paul Simonon

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus. — Sol LeWitt

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought. — Dana Gioia

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation. — Theodore Dalrymple

The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction. — Sverker Sorlin

We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand. — Massimiliano Gioni

Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality. — Walter Darby Bannard

I don't work as a conceptualist. Let's say the conceptual art model is that you have a project idea, or a set of concerns, and then you illustrate those concerns in whatever manner you see appropriate. For me, it has always been that the world suggests far more subtle and interesting variations than I could ever come up with. — John Gossage

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. — Sol LeWitt

Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression. — Brian Christian

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man's response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. — Ayn Rand

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on. — Gus Van Sant

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble. — Jenny Saville

The idea of making [conceptual] art was not a good way to approach things ... Instead I saw myself as trying to make something that my relatives could understand. — Sandy Skoglund

Uniquely specific, direct, non-linguistic experience is the element in which we live, and it is radically different from conceptual thinking, which can go on only in universals. This is why works of art, embodying as they do unique particulars and insights that cannot be conveyed in words, and cannot be mirrored in conceptual thought, have their roots in lived life and also cannot be translated [into words]. It is why, if someone responds to art predominantly with his intellect, he has already misunderstood it. — Bryan Magee

People who look at art don't really - don't go with the artist. They don't sort of accept what he or she has done and kind of go with it. There are always - either there's too much color or not enough color, either it's not conceptual enough or it's too conceptual. In other words, most criticism isn't what the viewer expected that it would do based on what they think you have done and that's good as far as I'm concerned. — Robert Barry

Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit. — Alex Grey

Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place. — M.I.A.

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A — David Bayles

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art. — Sol LeWitt

I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art-I still see this. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer. — Robert Montgomery

There is a conceptual depth as well as a purely visual depth. The first is discovered by science; the second is revealed in art. The first aids us in understanding the reasons of things; the second in seeing their forms. In science we try to trace phenomena back to their first causes, and to general laws and principles. In art we are absorbed in their immediate appearance, and we enjoy this appearance to the fullest extent in all its richness and variety. Here we are not concerned with the uniformity of laws but with the multiformity and diversity of intuitions. — Ernst Cassirer

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures. — Tony Kaye

It true, Bigfoot career been in hole lately. Bigfoot mania of the '70's and '80's but distant memory. I famous for ability to not be see but don't think I not notice you not notice. I blame music television and internet. People too lazy and stupid to appreciate conceptual artist like Bigfoot who appeal is absence. — Graham Roumieu

I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people's marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven't crashed the codes, and if you don't know what it is, you feel it's a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it's fraud. — Barbara Kruger

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever. — John Baldessari

The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests. — Scott Kahn

Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description. — Alexander Stoddart