John Baldessari Art Quotations

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.

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.

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

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 Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where this work will be exhibited in relation to the historical paintings) become illustrations of the movie scripts. I found this mélange of high art and Hollywood amusing.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

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.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

That should be the goal for all art, to be as simple as a flashcard.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

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.

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.

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE

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.

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.

I will not make anymore boring art.

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We don’t get it. What’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.

When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job.