Artistic Discovery Quotes

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

If you wait until you're an adult to be exposed to the arts, it could seem elitist, it could seem out of reach, it could seem scary.

I was always waiting for the secret to be handed down to me. Ron Howard asked me what I was waiting for and I went, "Ron, I'm waiting to know the secret. I keep feeling there's some sort of secret that's going to passed on from a director." He went, "Oh no. There is none. You've just got to on and do it and make mistakes and figure it out."

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

For me, the making of exhibitions has always had to do with dialogue: a concentrated, in-depth, focused dialogue with artists, who keep teaching me that exhibitions should always invent new rules for the game.

I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

Art doesn't just happen by accident. It is about pulling out new tricks and trying new things.

Interestingly, when you do films, sometimes you have conscious reasons, things that you were looking for, or stuff that you were trying to do. And then, you see the film and you think, "Wow, it ended up being something totally different!"

As an artist, I think it's important to always keep growing, and I definitely want to keep challenging myself.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I think music has always been what I always wanted to do, but I didn't know how or when I was going to get discovered.

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.

I'm inspired by artists and musicians. There are so many wonderful and talented people in the world. I love discovering new music, new writers, or new art.

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.

The secret of life is in art.

Sometimes, going to see one opera is hard because you don't know the genre. Good opera is like good wine. There are so many varieties, and it helps to inform you about what you like when you see a lot.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

Part of the fun is finding out how elastic that box is and, you know, test the limits of what TV shows can do or what a music video can do.

Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.