Brice Marden Quotes

I love the idea of hitchhiking into the city. It was bizarre.

Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That’s a big shift.

Western art has a certain relationship to nature.

I smoke pot when I work. I take a couple of tokes before I start. It just loosens you up.

These days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn’t have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell.

I don’t remember any dream. All I remember is waking up and feeling that there had been a change while I was sleeping.

I respect all artists, just some more than the others. Because it’s something that really needs to be done.

I remember getting out of grad school and coming to New York and not wanting to get a teaching job because I wanted to work on my own, to develop my own ideas. There isn’t that time now. Artists are exhibiting while they are still in grad school. There isn’t that safety cushion.

When you’re not smoking anymore, you don’t have to carry around a pack of cigarettes, a lighter – all this paraphernalia. So you’re liberated in a certain sense. It’s the same with drinking.

Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that’s really good that’s what it’s doing.

Every time I open the paper, there’s some symphony orchestra collapsing somewhere in the United States. What the hell is going on? And then you find out that the board members try to run these things as businesses.