Quotes About Conceptual Art

#1. Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

Alexander Stoddart

#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. Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

Sol LeWitt

#4. Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

Harold Rosenberg

#5. I thought conceptual art was a joke.

Gian Carlo Menotti

#6. I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

Tim Crouch

#7. What art is not processed? "Conceptual art." Somebody making a painting has to conceive of the size. I don't understand where these words came from. I can't accept the fact that the concept of art as our concept of humanity is expanding.

Lawrence Weiner

#8. I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

David Salle

#9. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

Kim Gordon

#10. Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.

Brian Christian

#11. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

Sol LeWitt

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Dan Graham

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

Sol LeWitt

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Will Self

#21. 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

#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. 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

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

Paul Simonon

#25. 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

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

Walter Darby Bannard

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

Peter Sotos

#28. 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

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

Sol LeWitt

#30. 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

#31. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Neil Farber

#32. I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

Leonard Nimoy

#33. The canvas isn't empty. It's full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don't even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.

Jarod Kintz

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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.

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Dana Gioia

#42. 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

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

Joseph Kosuth