Joseph Beuys Quotes

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures - but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist's own art.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.

What I'm working on is for people to be able to say that Kippenberger had this really good mood.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars.

The artist is called a creator.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Abstract expression is so solid, so successful and recognizable, but there's a mystery about the artists that goes into it, a fetishism about the artists themselves and who they were.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.