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Douglas Crimp Quotes

The desire of representation exists only insofar as the original is always deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.

The desire of representation exists only insofar as the original is always deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.

Douglas Crimp
Desire, Absence, Representation
Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler (1995). “On the Museum's Ruins”, p.119, MIT Press

Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence... are undermined.

Douglas Crimp
Art, Technology, Creating
Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler (1995). “On the Museum's Ruins”, p.58, MIT Press

To an ever greater extent out experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures firsthand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncover a lost reality, but to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord.

Douglas Crimp
Reality, Order, Cinema

Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.

Douglas Crimp
Photography, Art, Definitions
Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler (1995). “On the Museum's Ruins”, p.134, MIT Press

[Cindy Sherman's] photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.

Douglas Crimp
Art, Real, Self

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