John Baldessari 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.

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

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?

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.

It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.

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.