Participatory Art Quotes

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user.

I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

I want to create the largest-ever participatory art project and highlight the concept of Shadow Philanthropy, where people help others create work without taking credit for it - through this we can really change the world.

If I'm at a party, and there are lots of people running around, you'll most likely find me on the floor, painting... I want to be at the party, but I want to do something. I'm just not very idle at all.

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.

The real art is in the street, is making the artwork, and for that you have to involve people. The action is actually the artwork.

Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

All I want to do is make sure that art is available to all Americans in a participatory way, whether you engage in the art process yourself or you're an audience member.

I would give the cameras to the kids in the swimming pools and they would play with them, and then I would collect them and we would upload it. If you're in the process, you're there.

I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.

I like a movie that the audience actively has to participate in, and not just casually observe. Whatever my part in it, just as an audience member, I find that exciting.

The best art is realized when you can share the experience of making of it and not just the presentation of it, so that the audience is part of the creation and not just part of the consumption. Then it becomes much more full-bodied and robust.

I see the artist as a participant, a co-producer of reality. I do not see the artist as a person who sits at a distance and evaluates.

I see the artist as a participant, a co-producer of reality.

At the Big Bad Lab, we build participatory art and media platforms for causes, communities and organizations we care about.

The idea of a 'happening' is that there is little distance between the viewer and it, whatever 'it' is. It's an experience that's on-going and evolving.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

I was interested in making work that physically changed as it circulated through the art world.

Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do. Music that you want to throw your body into it - that's a feeling that I'm not quite satisfied with having made yet.