It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.
As an artist, you can always learn different ways to refine your look. I mean, you look at any one time in my career and you see all the hairstyles I went through. You make changes until something feels comfortable with you. And people vibe with it because they can see the difference.
True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.
Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.
The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.
[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.
Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.
I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with my works.
As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting.
With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.
I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.
The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.
Sometimes you have to gag on fancy before you can appreciate plain.
The older ideas are rendering more and more bland music.
Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich. (The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
I think an art collection is a lot like a diary. Your taste evolves with time. I try to never sell anything, because it's part of my journey.
Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?
Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
Film can become stagnant as a medium.
The entire making of 'Within and Without' was a series of experiments and trial by error. When I started writing, I didn't have a strong idea of what the record was going to end up like.
Fashion is made up of paradoxes. There was a key moment in fashion. When the Japanese first arrived - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and all - I have to humbly admit that I didn't understand the importance of it at all. It was Jean-Jacques Picart who explained it to me. They had a huge influence in that they showed that aestheticism could be different from prettiness, that there was beauty and that beauty was beyond pretty.
