Nate Lowman Quotations

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.

I'm really interested in the difference between selfishness and generosity. It confuses me to no end because sometimes it all just feels like pure indulgence on my part.

A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like "I'm happy! I swear!" I'm not buying it. I don't believe them.

I do believe that I will see the apocalypse in my lifetime. And when it comes, I'm not repenting for anything I've done.

I do not connect fashion to elegance. Elegance is in the wilderness, and fashion is in the domestic.

When you mix fashion and politics, you get fascism. Politics have fashion, and it's bad; fashion has politics, that are ugly.

It's a shame when other people's gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it's too expensive to be interesting or moving. That's when I get bummed out.

I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. It could be from a newspaper, on the street. It could be something I fell over.

Dead people don't really die. They live on within you.

I don't have a great imagination to share something with you that you don't know, so it's about interpreting things - a dialogue.

I think that fashion is industrial, whereas style is ideological. So they're not necessarily connected.

I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.

I'm not a pessimist at all, but I'm not an optimist, either.

A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.

Architecture is a discourse; everything is a discourse. Fashion discourse is actually a micro-discourse, because it's centered around the body. It is the most rapidly developing form of discourse.

I think of other artists as generous when I get inspired by their work. That's why I like curating. You don't want to take someone else's art and have your way with it. You've got to be respectful of them.

I feel like the biggest failure of humans is miscommunication. We can't communicate with each other-we can fight, we can kill, we can do those things well.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

There are so many different desires that make you execute an artwork.

It's nice that I can go down the road of obsessing over this smiley-face bullshit so maybe I can get free from it and think about something else-it's so banal and yet so crazy!

People have these weird ideas about artists being romantic, generous people, and sometimes I feel like an asshole, a selfish kid, a brat, the lucky one, because I get to do this and it's how I make my living.

The night schedule is a crazy pit I fall into most of the time, but I do like it because the buzz of normal professionalism has gone away. Even though you're working, you feel like you're playing.

For me, Corsica is a place that I visited with my friends, maybe five or six times over the years, and I'm so happy there that I wanted to make a painting about it almost just to share with my friends, but it's so difficult when all your feelings are one way, and they're very sort of happy and pleasant. It's impossible to make a painting about it.

I'm really interested in the difference between selfishness and generosity . It confuses me to no end because sometimes it all just feels like pure indulgence on my part.