Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]
Look, Matisse I ain’t. You know how they have on the invitations, “a reception for the artist will be held at...” And I say, “Look, you gotta change this. I’m not an artist. I’m a photographer, a skilled craftsman.”
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
As we know, cubism was a reaction on the part of painters to the invention of photography. Photography and cinema made struggling for exact
likeness childish.
(1935)
Glenn Ligon
[Artist, b. 1960, Bronx, New York, lives in New York.]
Art points to things. It’s a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.
E. H. Gombrich
[Historian and writer, b. 1909, Vienna, Austria, d. 2001, London.]
All art is “image making” and all image making is the creation of substitutes.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
[Artist, b. 1953, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
I find it very uninteresting, most of the time, to be involved in the art world... It’s just hard to spend that much time and that much effort on something that is enormously loaded with pretensions but everyone will admit has little or no effect on the world at large.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
Browsing through the stacks of the New York Public Library where books on the general subject of transportation were shelved, I came across the book by Ed Ruscha entitled “Twentysix Gasoline Stations,” a work first published in 1963 and consisting of just that: 26 gasoline stations. I remember thinking how funny it was that the book had been miscatalogued and placed alongside books about automobiles, highways, and so forth. I knew, as the librarians evidently did not, that Ruscha’s book was a work of art and therefore belonged in the art division. But now, because of the considerations of postmodernism, I've changed my mind; I now know that Ed Ruscha’s books make no sense in relation to the categories of art according to which art books are catalogued in the library, and that is part of their achievement. The fact that there is nowhere in the present system of classification a place for “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” is an index of its radicalism with respect to established modes of thought.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe… one cannot photograph art. One can only live it in the unity of his vision, as well as in the breadth of his humanity, vitality, and understanding. There is no formula—only man with his conscience speaking, writing, and singing in the new hieroglyphic language of light and time.
Paul Klee
[Artist, b. 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, d. 1940, Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.]
The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.
