Marina Abramovic Quotes

You know, I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson. One of my favorite records is 'The Ugly One With the Jewels,' a spoken-word record. It's an extraordinary album.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

I am thrilled Lady Gaga has helped to teach her audience about long durational work and performance art.

Anne Imhof is a powerful artist from Germany making work that is totally interdisciplinary.

It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.

Being an artist doesn't just mean you have a song. That doesn't make you an artist. The word 'artist' means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists - Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West - are doing the most.

I love the song 'Picasso Baby,' and I think the performance art piece was brilliant. I love that fact that Jay Z is continuing to raise the bar on hip hop.

When I started doing drag, I always put together multimedia elements for live performance.

I remember films I made at university, which are unbelievably pretentious. Poetry that I'd written that I delivered to camera, against a Venetian blind, strong shadows, looking slightly off-camera.

John Cage is someone I got into as a visual artist, before I even knew his music. I don't think a lot of people even know that he does visual art.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

I love Grace Jones. She's everything.

First of all, I'm not a singer or rapper. I'm an artiste. Besides singing, I produce music, dance, write poetry, and sometimes I paint as well.

Gerry Dow - he's like a fourth member. He lives in Sweden; his art work is more important than... it's just as important as the music and the stage show.

I view myself as a musician and I focus on music - other people may try to focus on the music, but the emphasis is heavily on visuals and performance. They're both equally valid, but different.

I paint because I love to paint. If someone buys the prints or whatever, so be it, but it's not my main form of business. As a performer, that is my main form of business.

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

I love creating art, whether it's with photos, my own body, or clothes.

I love performing. I love being a provocateur. I love putting myself in situations that are uncomfortable and that I have to get out of.

When I did "Seven Easy Pieces," I actually re-performed the performances of other artists. It was such difficult work because I had to really go through the documentation, look through the sources, to ask the witnesses who saw it.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.