John Baldessari Quotes

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah.' And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.

I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure.

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job.

I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.

If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ... " You're going to end up with a big green painting.

That should be the goal for all art, to be as simple as a flashcard.

I used to jokingly say, "I don't teach art. I'm an art doctor." Students come to me and say, "My art's sick," and we help them make it well.

Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

I guess I get bored easily, and thank God. I don't want to all my life pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I'm not trying to denigrate anybody.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.