Art Alexakis Quotes

“Forgiveness is hard for me, man. It is for most American-Western males. It's a sign of weakness.”

“I have a pet peeve about bands that don't play their hits. I think it's kind of selfish.”

“I'm a pretty tenacious person; I get that from my mom. So sometimes, I use dark humor. I can't take myself too seriously.”

“I want to walk inside a Van Gogh sun, and see a better world all different and new.I want to live where there are no shadows, of all those stupid things we both know that we used to do.I want to walk inside a Van Gogh sun, I want to see the world exactly like you do.I want to live where the past doesn’t matter, Whatever it takes I will never give up on you.”

“In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.”

“Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.”

“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”

“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”

“While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.”

“The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection.”