Robert Barry Mean Quotations

I'm my own worst critic. I mean, I know what's wrong with everything that I've done.

I mean, part of the justification for art is art history, the fact that you're part of this tradition. You can't really operate outside of it. So looking for what this work is really about, if I look at Velázquez, if I look at Las Meninas or The Tapestry Weavers [1657] or something and really study it and try to figure out what that painting is really about, then I find relationships between what I'm trying to do and what he was doing.

And when you see artists like Donald Judd and so forth being referred to as conceptual, what the hell does that mean? It's a totally meaningless term.

The words represent ideas first of all. That is something you have to understand. I mean, it is not just an object, but it is an object with a history and it is loaded with all kinds of implications and ideas. They exist in the world in a very special way. So they kind of represent some aspect of the world that we perceive, as do photographs, as do drawings of trees or whatever. And they are not a one to one. They are not the world, but they kind of refer to the world and they also exist in the world.

People ask me why I use words and the reason, of course, is that words talk to you. I mean, they're something that are generated inside of you and that you can relate to you.