Carl Andre Art Quotations

I was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen.. ...when you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

That's another way, perhaps, of an art poverty; one has to impoverish one's mind.

I find that my greatest difficulty and the really most painful and difficult part of my work is draining and ridding my mind of that burden of meanings which I've absorbed through the culture-things that seem to have something to do with art but don't have anything to do with art at all.

Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.