Claes Oldenburg Art Quotations

Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.

I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn't go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.