"There is no death! Death only exists for those who cannot accept evolution. Everything changes. Death is a transition from movement to movement. Death is static. Death is movement. Death is static. Death is movement."

16 quotes

🇺🇸Matthew Barney

Art

contemporary art

b. 1967

"The film moves at what I consider to be the speed of art — which is slow. Cremaster 2 does what I think sculpture does: It moves slowly and requires that one move around it to understand it, and to visit it repeatedly."

"Eventually, I'd like one monitor at the North Pole, one at the South, and two at the equator, big monitors switching images back and forth."

"Society is basically not interested in art. Art has a purpose of its own."

"There’s no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist. It’s not like becoming a doctor or something. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."

"The problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art."

"I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them."

6 quotes

🇬🇧Damien Hirst

Art

Young British Artists

b. 1965

"I started taking cocaine and drink ... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck."

"The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself."

"I never thought I was shocking,” she says. “I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘This is something they need. My culture is going to recognize it’s missing something.'"

"The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!"

"I don't want to make plop art — sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture."

6 quotes

🇬🇧Tracey Emin

Art

Young British Artists

b. 1963

"There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol."

"I'd never trust anyone who hadn't spent at least one night of his youth in the local jail. The more hell you raise as a teen-ager, the sweeter your memories will be."

"Without electricity, there can be no art."

"I have no complaints, except for the world."

"Events are weapons for politicization of art."

"I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it. I just make it first and then it becomes much clearer to me why."

"For me personally, the greatest art to date has been created in New York and the most uptight and conventional art in Berlin. Obviously, I am an exception to this rule!"

35 quotes