Reasons, Decisions, Explanations

 

“You don’t become a painter to have some tedious life.” Brice Marden

 

“It’s your job to put it on the streets.” Lawrence Weiner

 

“Duchamp is just a guy.” Lane Cooper

 

“If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” Stevie Wonder 

 

“Each attempt to question painting’s boundaries in the past ended up contributing to its revitalization.” Isabelle Graw

 

"The school of… The school of… If you’re “the school of…” - you are dead.” Richard Artschwager

 

“Sometimes you feel doing one thing, sometimes the other. You don’t have to decide between, both are good.” Gerhard Richter

 

“It’s the intellectuals, the writers, the artists who do intellectual work, who are committed to long-term views of society. We are the stable force in society, not the other ones who want to present us so often as irrational. I think we have a certain built-in mission to being an artist now, which is very much to resist corporate culture. But we have to struggle against a market that wants to provide the meaning where it’s been our job to fight for the meaning of our work.” Joseph Kosuth 

 

“Frustration is one of the greatest things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.” Philip Guston

 

“If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art.” John Baldessari 

 

“The creation and public sharing of art is essential to any practice of freedom.” bell hooks

 

“The project of art today should be the notion of being alive.” Alex Vlasov

 

“Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is beauty.” Susan Sontag

 

“Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.” Dave Hickey

 

“One starts with the known in order to arrive at the unknown.” Jonathan Lasker

 

“Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty.” Walt Whitman

 

“My paintings are not too bourgeois.” Sean Scully

 

“Doing artwork is an act of solitude. This act of solitude has nothing to do with narcissistic or depressive self-enclosure. This solitude is my try to resist. I want to resist to the tendency of making things nice. I don’t want to make things nicer than they are. I want through my artwork being cruel. But I want to be cruel with myself first.” Thomas Hirschhorn

 

“Art should raise questions.” Bruce Nauman

 

“Don’t cry - work.” Andy Warhol

 

Alex Vlasov

October 2023