Home / Quotes / Quote by John Baldessari

Quote by John Baldessari

“I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.”

Author

John Baldessari is an influential American artist born on June 17, 1931. Known for his unique artistic style and conceptual art works, his art often explores the relationship between art and life, reality and fiction. more

“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.”

“From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note.... The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking.”

Moments Records Fronts Notes Notion Destroyed Features Site Tourists

Author:Martin Parr

“Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.”

Mind Joy Animal Concepts

Author:Peter Schjeldahl

“Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.”

Art Literature Memories Photography Critical Visuals Anticipation Imaginative Formation Visual Art Prerogative Handmade

Author:Peter Schjeldahl

“There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.”

People Differences Attitude Cameras Ineffable

Author:Peter Schjeldahl

“The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.”

Art Problem Eye Film Cases Special Painting Pride Photography Bases Cameras Video Mediums Dominant Extensions Nineteen Verdict Withered Pictorial Exemption

Author:Peter Schjeldahl

“A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.”

May Courses Instruments Including Photograph

Book:Let's see: writings on art from the New Yorker

Source: Let's see: writings on art from the New Yorker

“To me extreme things are like miracles. There is nothing as boring as a person who is just okay. But I could easily live in a world populated with these disjunctive, bizarre things... I operate out of confusion, towards clarity.”

World Persons Okay Miracle Boring Extremes Confusion Clarity Bizarre

Author:Joel-Peter Witkin

“If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.”

Ifs Pain My Own Existence Photograph Relate

Author:Joel-Peter Witkin

Quote by John Baldessari

Author

You May Also Like