Artistic Intervention Quotes

There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

Art needs an operation

To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?

If a picture wasn't going very well, I'd put a puppy in it.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

If a picture wasn't going very well I'd put a puppy dog in it, always a mongrel, you know, never one of the full bred puppies. And then I'd put a bandage on its foot... I liked it when I did it, but now I'm sick of it.

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

I got into architecture via fine arts, and I was a sculptor myself, and I have always involved artists in my projects. When I say 'involved,' I mean I always bring artists in at the beginning projects before they're built and say, 'Will you do a room? Will you do a sculpture floating in mid-air? Will you make a chimney? Will you do something?'

It must be every critic's dream when you're at something utterly intolerable to actually get up and intervene and make it stop.

My idea is to fill an intersection with color. That will include the road and the sidewalk and up the building, so there's a cubic volume of color in the intersection wedged between four corners and four buildings.

We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.