Carl Andre Quotes

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.

The wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way.

If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.

You can always find somebody to beat up. This goes back to the schoolyard. Most men would think, Don't chum with girls. But I chummed with girls.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

It seems with progress you gain certain things and you lose certain things. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy but you lost all of that nice manure.

Money is a very complicated problem. The history of money is very curious.

If you forge a Carl Andre, it's just another Carl Andre. It's not like a Vermeer.

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

I believe that woman are superior to men.

What I made depended on what I found on the street. At least in the beginning, my materials came from the street.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

I was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.

New York is dead. It's too expensive.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.