Carl Andre Quotes about Art

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.