Conceptual Art Quotes

• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

  Aristotle

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

  205 Copy quote

• The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Machines

  Sol LeWitt, Andrea Miller-Keller, John B. Ravenal (1984). “From the Collection of Sol LeWitt: A Traveling Exhibition Organized and Circulated by Independent Curators Incorporated, New York”, Independent Curators

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Important

  1967 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', in Artforum, summer.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Mind

  "Damien Hirst: 'Art is childish and childlike'". Interview with Elizabeth Day, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Simple, Obvious Things

  13 Copy quote

• Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Ideas, Ifs

  Source: www.believermag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Art, Mean, Ideas

  Lucy R. Lippard (1973). “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ...”, p.7, Univ of California Press

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, People, Remember

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 13, 2013.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, People, Division

  Source: briansherwin-artcritic.blogspot.com

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Sol LeWitt

  Art, Real, Years

  "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow". Interview with Saul Ostrow, bombmagazine.org. October 1, 2003.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, Mind, Finals

  "Art and Other Serious Matters". Book by Harold Rosenberg. Chapter: "American Drawing", pp. 247-248, 1985.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Civilization, Parent

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Alexander Stoddart

  Art, Facts, Kind

  7 Copy quote

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

  Sol LeWitt

  Photography, Art, Development

  "Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow". Interview with Saul Ostrow, bombmagazine.org. October 1, 2003.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Quality, Facts

  4 Copy quote

• So much of the hubris that surrounded conceptual art in the 1950s through '70s was that it had this arrogant presupposition that pointing in and of itself was a creative act. It never rigorously politically and socially analyzed the fact that the luxury to point is something that so many people throughout the world don't have.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Luxury, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Organization

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• Im not trying to do conceptual art.

  Peter Sotos

  Art, Trying

  5 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Art, Apology, Cake

  2001 Feeding Frenzy.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Children, Thinking

  "Jenny Saville: 'I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies'" by Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2012.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Ideas, Interesting

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Ideas, Trying

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Criticism, Culture

  "Kim Gordon Sounds Off" with Lizzy Goodman, www.elle.com. April 22, 2013.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Holiday, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source