Bill Viola Art Quotations

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.

Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.

Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.

If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional - a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Live your Art. Don't think about it.