Matthew Collings Quotes

#1. Artists don't often know much about writing ... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.

Matthew Collings

#2. The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

Matthew Collings

#3. The whole idea of ideas in art is useless. Only have ideas about form.

Matthew Collings

#4. I think with art you have to do a bit of transforming of the subject to make the art worth having.

Matthew Collings

#5. Until the late 1970s there'd either be only black or white in the paintings or if there were colours it would be a small amount, not a large area, and with the color separated from other colors by black or white (which is formula for Damien Hirst's successful dot paintings, incidentally).

Matthew Collings

#6. It was as if he (Sigmar Polke) painted his imagery in a highly wrought way, instead of a calculatedly dumb way, or mechanical way, by silk-screening or by tracing from epidiascope projections, and so on.

Matthew Collings

#7. What is painting today? It's a discontinued thing, discontinued from anything serious that happened in the past ...

Matthew Collings

#8. Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.

Matthew Collings

#9. The most painful thing for me is to be misunderstood.

Matthew Collings