Unexpected Art Quotes

One night in the early sixties I passed something on the Long Island Expressway just before the Queens tunnel that I must have seen for years. The billboard advertising cigars, Dutch Masters. I realized it was sort of perfect. It's weird isn't it? You're looking at Rembrandt - in neon! It was too much, it was irresistible.

I still believe that the best art - be it music, comedy, painting, etc. - is the art that hasn't been asked for, or is expected.

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.

I paint stupid things; that's what I do. I can't think of anything more boring than a really beautiful thing. You have to mess it up. There has to be something a little kinky to keep their attention.

Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

With the most interesting directors, the cast comes together to make something magical that nobody counted on.

I don't want to paint rainbows: I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority.

To me, writing is like singing in the most inappropriate place, singing as beautifully as you can on a bus or in a bank, where people least expect it, and trying to get them to want to listen.

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.