David Rockefeller Quotes

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant.

I think I come from a time when all the artists I grew up with and I loved always used to try and push the boundaries, and there doesn't seem so much of that, really.

People often swear the first time they see my work. I like that.

When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing - James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.

Movies should make people uncomfortable sometimes.

Frank Sinatra changed people's approach to singing. Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, van Gogh, they were all part of movements that allowed people to think about their craft differently. They changed the game. These people changed the game.

Warhol was proof that you can be revolutionary without being militant.

I decided to make one of the most controversial songs that I could. I want to get under people's skin.

I think the best artists are the ones who constantly change - Madonna, Bowie.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

Music is forever changing.

In the past, I've always written about my experiences, and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through. I'm still keeping it young and edgy, but I'm definitely putting more of a mainstream twist to it.