Artist Quotes - Page 279

I know for me as an artist, I think I do myself and my listeners a disservice, if I don't listen to some of the best music out there. If I was an architect or a carpenter, I'm going to want to study the best architects and carpenters and I'm going to appreciate their work, because they're going to inspire me to do well. And I just look at them as great architects and I just appreciate the gift that God gave them.

I'm a martial artist. I've boxed all my life. I work out. I studied Hwarangdo, which is a Korean style.

Now "professional" seems to be whoever you went to school with. It constitutes your nuclear world. And that's the fault of the teachers; it's not the fault of the young artist.

Artists try to ask questions, and within our society, unless there are artists, those questions don't get asked. And everybody blames the market.

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.

Being an artist is like being an athlete. You have to be in there every day, keeping in shape. You have to be fearless. You have to be confident, and if you start getting thrown by criticism or esthetic terminology, you're going to fall off the balance beam and hit your head and do some injury.

Lenny Kravitz is one of my favorite musical artists.

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

Being scared is really a good thing. It's being scared of being scared that's bad. Being scared of walking through your fear, going to a place of true creativity - that's what an artist is, that's what he does. If you do that, then being inspired by your contemporaries or people from the past is really great.

I think that there was a fad where everyone said, "I want you to create a signature step for my artist." The thing is, for me, music creates the step. The artist commands the step, you know?

Artist development is something that I've been passionate about from my days at Uptown and Motown Records.

I was very disenchanted in the industry for a long time before I met GaGa. Everyone wanted a "Single Ladies" for their artist, or a Puffy move.

For me, a dancer is part of an artist’s entertainment - “backup dancer” isn’t even in my vocabulary.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

Gut level is a good level to deal with life, and for me, I have to say that Buddhism makes sense for me because it's how I'm an artist.

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.

I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral.

I can't draw. I can't paint. But what I can do is tell somebody else what to do. I'm a creator. I can tell an artist what to do. I can be behind the artist. I have the eye, so I can move things around. I can put stones together. I can match them.

To be an artist is to take responsibility for the world's destiny. You shape it by your vision.