Non Conceptual Art Quotes

#1. I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Paul Simonon

#2. I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

Tony Kaye

#3. After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

David Sedaris

#4. The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light.

Luigi Ghirri

#5. In fact I always disliked conceptual art, because my work is about anarchistic humor.

Dan Graham

#6. Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

Sol LeWitt

#7. The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.

Sverker Sorlin

#8. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

Sol LeWitt

#9. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Sol LeWitt

#10. There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

Andrei Codrescu

#11. Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Damien Hirst

#12. I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

Peter Sotos

#13. Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.

Walter Darby Bannard

#14. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

Alex Grey

#15. The idea of making [conceptual] art was not a good way to approach things ... Instead I saw myself as trying to make something that my relatives could understand.

Sandy Skoglund

#16. John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

Jerry Saltz

#17. The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

Gus Van Sant

#18. I always thought there was a - even in the most, quote, "conceptual art," there is always a physical aspect to it. I never knew what the term meant.

Robert Barry

#19. Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

M.I.A.

#20. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

William H Gass

#21. The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

Scott Kahn

#22. When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

Kyp Malone

#23. 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.

John Baldessari

#24. We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand.

Massimiliano Gioni

#25. I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Will Self

#26. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Dana Gioia

#27. I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

Michael Craig-Martin

#28. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Sol LeWitt

#29. It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

Paul Simonon

#30. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

Joseph Kosuth