Food for thought

Lawrence Weiner-

"Industrial and socioeconomic machinery pollutes the environment and the day the artist feels obliged to muck it up further art should cease being made. If you can't make art without making a permanent imprint on the physical aspects of the world, then maybe art is not worth making. In this sense, any permanent damage to ecological factors in nature not necessary for the futherance of human existance, but only necessary for the illustration of an art concept, is a crime against humanity. For art being made by artists for other human beings should never be utilized against human beings, unless the artist is willing to renounce his position as an artist and take on the position of a god. Being an artist means doing a minimum of harm to other human beings. Big egocentric expensive works become very imposing. You can't put twenty-four tons of steel in the closet."


Bruce Nauman-

"Art can never... have any direct political or social impact on culture. But I would think that art is what's used in history; it's what's kind of left. And that's how we view history, as through art and writing, art in the broad sense: music and writing and all that,... you know art is political in the sense that it pokes at the edges of what's accepted or what's acceptable, or because it does investigate why people do art or why people do anything, or how the culture can and should function. I think art's about those things, and art is a very indirect way of pursuing those kinds of thoughts. So the impact has to be indirect, but at the same time I think it can be real. I think it's almost impossible to predict or say what it is, but it certainly doesn't apply to the political situation today or tomorrow, except in an abstract and more general way. I think that with art on philosophy..., if you think of art as discipline, the people that are interesting are the people that are exploring the structure of the discipline. In that sence they are breaking the discipline down, too, as they're expanding it. They tend to break down what's there. Certainly there are artists who function entirely within the discipline. I would find those people uninteresting. Not that they're not talented or skilled or all those things, but it's not of interest to me. In that sense there's a great deal of confusion, because it doesn't require being able to draw or being able to paint well or know colors, it doesn't require any of those specific things that are discipline, to be interesting. On the other hand, if you don't have any skill at all, then you can't communicate, either, so it's an interesting edge between - that edge is interesting for those reasons."