John Baldessari

It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.

— John Baldessari

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art,…

— John Baldessari

The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why…

— John Baldessari

I will not make anymore boring art.

— John Baldessari

Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.

— John Baldessari

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

— John Baldessari

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

— John Baldessari

I think I live such a boring life. But I can't imagine any other kind of life, so I guess it's the…

— John Baldessari

I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of…

— John Baldessari

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

— John Baldessari

Most of my friends are women. I think women are more interesting to talk to.

— John Baldessari

The idea was to take fine art and put it into the location of the movie scripts. The script itself is collage…

— John Baldessari

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

— John Baldessari

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

— John Baldessari

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

— John Baldessari

If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to…

— John Baldessari

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We don’t get it. What’s modern art? Blah,…

— John Baldessari

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest…

— John Baldessari

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint…

— John Baldessari

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move…

— John Baldessari

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going…

— John Baldessari

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

— John Baldessari

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these…

— John Baldessari

When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then…

— John Baldessari

That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill…

— John Baldessari