John Baldessari famous quotes

04-19-2025

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We donâ€™t get it. Whatâ€™s modern art? Blah, blah, blah.' And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Tired #Kids
It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.
-- John Baldessari

#Desire #Feels #Understood
If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Saws
That should be the goal for all art, to be as simple as a flashcard.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Simple #Goal
Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.
-- John Baldessari

#Eye #Air #Hands
I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.
-- John Baldessari

#Window #Dickens
Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.
-- John Baldessari

#Artist #Way #Findings
I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Thinking #Vision
Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Talent #Like You
I think I live such a boring life. But I can't imagine any other kind of life, so I guess it's the life I want.
-- John Baldessari

#Thinking #Want #Kind
I used to jokingly say, "I don't teach art. I'm an art doctor." Students come to me and say, "My art's sick," and we help them make it well.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Doctors #Sick
A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Ideas #Green
If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.
-- John Baldessari

#Smart #Successful #Work Out
Most of my friends are women. I think women are more interesting to talk to.
-- John Baldessari

#Thinking #Interesting
I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.
-- John Baldessari

#Meaningful #Art #Moving
I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?
-- John Baldessari

#Why Not #Definitions #Normal
I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Thinking #People
I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.
-- John Baldessari

#Trying #World #Littles
I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.
-- John Baldessari

#Simple
The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent.
-- John Baldessari

#Ideas #Vaudeville #Flaws
The idea was to take fine art and put it into the location of the movie scripts. The script itself is collage - some of the lines come from actual movies and I've written others to make the text work with the found image. In this way, the details of old dead guys' paintings (from the collection of the StÃ¤del Museum in Frankfurt, where this work will be exhibited in relation to the historical paintings) become illustrations of the movie scripts. I found this mÃ©lange of high art and Hollywood amusing.
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Museums #Illustration
Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.
-- John Baldessari

#Writing #Thinking
I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure.
-- John Baldessari

#Couple #Teaching #College
Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.
-- John Baldessari

#Photography #Cameras #Worst
Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?
-- John Baldessari

#Art #Wells
A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE
-- John Baldessari

#Two #Articulation #Surface
I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.
-- John Baldessari

#Photography #Art #Figures

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