Robert Longo Quotes

An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long.

My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.

It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.

When I look back on everything I've done, it all somehow makes sense to me. But it doesn't make sense when you're actually doing it.

The artist has to be a guardian of the culture.

If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.

The translation process becomes a highly subjective thing - turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It's really bizarre for me.

I find that all these subjects that I'm dealing with tend to lead me to religion and politics one way or another. It's not something that I necessarily want to address, but it seems like it's screaming at me to pay attention to it.

I'm trying to find answers. It can be quite frustrating, but at the same time, I'm never quite satisfied with what I'm doing, so I'm always looking for the next thing.

There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was.

A lot of us grew up in public. That often means that you have to fail in public too.

Art is a form of understanding like philosophy and science and mathematics are an understanding but the difference is that art has the capacity to hold all these different things. It is the form of understanding that is best suited for the contemporary time.

I've been dealing with epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics.

Dying young is the easy way out. It's much harder to keep your edge and keep it going.

You make the work for yourself first and the next line is the people you trust, and you know that they're going to tell you what they feel. They let you know if you're dishing bullshit or if it's real.

The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.

I always imagine that I want to make art that is going to kill you,whether it’s going to do it visually or physically, I’ll take either way.

I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

I think the pursuit of trying to understand things is really a critical issue. I see the issue of life and death in everything I do. I'm trying to find answers. It can be quite frustrating.

One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.

It's been like therapy to be able to play music and not embarrass my children too much. They've come to a bunch of the shows. It's kind of cool. I'm glad they like it.

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.

The great thing about doing a show in New York is that you can work until the night before.

I started realizing I have enough history that some of it has been forgotten.

And I'm sort of deconstructing the process of what marks came first, what came later. Every aspect of the image is interesting to me to dissect and understand.

I can't come up with the titles. My wife hates my titles. She doesn't even want to know about them.

The thing that's interesting as you get older as an artist is that the biggest challenge seems to be: how do you stay relevant?

As an artist - I'm sure like most creative people - you have a kind of board of directors that you make your work for. It's a group of people that you have, these friends, and you want to know what they think. In a weird way, you're making the work for them.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.