Claes Oldenburg Quotes

17 quotes in 225 categories

• I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
• If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.
• Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.
• Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
• Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
• I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art…
• I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
• My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
• I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips,…
• I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract,…
• I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
• All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
• Painting, especially much better than words, allows oneself to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of the mental…
• My single-minded aim is to give existence to fantasy.
• My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it,…
• I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.
• A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and…

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