Claes Oldenburg Quotes

I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.

Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.

My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.

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, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other.

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, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

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.

All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.

I like food because you can change it. I mean, there is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop; you can make all types of lamb chops. And that's true of everything. And people eat it and it changes and disappears.

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 that helps old ladies across the street.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

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 process.

Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first; he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.