I don't know if I should say this, but I feel more like a singer than an artist.
I'm an artist, but I'm also a businesswoman, and sometimes you have to play hard.
As an artist, I try and be controversial, and I have been a bit offensive at times. I have a view on the burka, and I'm sure a few of the Muslim girls and their families would have a view of me on stage in next to nothing!
When I signed a record deal, I was always told by execs I needed to be like everybody else, that I had to show my midriff, things that would take away from who I want to be as an artist.
I love artists that just do what they do with so much passion and emotion.
The best part of being signed by a major label was having the support of a big company behind me and the ability to meet new artists and producers.
It's a mystery to me why comics have been so despised for so long. Obviously, it has to do with the history of the medium - arising out of cheaply-reprinted booklets of newspaper strips, just out to make a quick buck, followed by mostly-crappy original work. It took a while for really talented artists to move into the comic-book world from the newspapers. It really is strange that even TV commercials got respect before comics did. I have never been able to figure it out.
Whenever I have time, I try to get in the studio and write, whether it's for me or other artists or my catalog of music. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the music industry.
Some people think that Southern hip-hop doesn't have any depth. They think it's just noise, all about people having a good time in the club. And some of it doesn't have a lot of depth, it's true, but some does. I wanted to work against that stereotype. These are verses by Southern artists who are really wrestling with what it means to be here, young black men who are trying to figure out how to live in the South. So I wanted the epigraphs in my novels to reflect that.
Violence has been a necessary component of every serious liberation struggle...Violence is not the only path to liberation, but likely an indispensable one...the Press Office would like to be clear on this matter: we support all the liberationists from the graffiti artists and ALF liberator to the Animal Rights Militia, Justice Department and Revolutionary Cells.
Artists are always looking for new things and fresh ground and fresh air. If it feels new to me, there's a chance it'll feel new to the audience and we'll have found something.
I don't want to hear at all what the artist thinks about his art. And I'm not writing for the artist. I'm writing for the reader, and I want to tell the reader what I think.
Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.
Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.
Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
The German ueber-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist.
In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.
I don't plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That's the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don't visit.
While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that's left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term.
One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women.
Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.
Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.
The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.
When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.
