Tony Tasset quotes

I make work that tries to sort of connect with something really, really familiar. I don't try to make work that's original. I try to make work that's quintessential. That's what I mean about the familiar. It operates with stuff that people already know or information that they already have and I try to just use that. Quintessential means like the perfect minimalist sculptor.
-- Tony Tasset

#Mean #People #Perfect

I've been an artist forever. I started when I was in the third grade. I drew drawings of monsters and I sold them to my classmates for a dime. I studied painting. Originally I was a design and illustration major, but I met this girl. Back then, if you were a designer, you were a real sellout, and she was a real hardcore painter. I knew she would never take me seriously unless I was an art major, so I switched majors to fine arts. Anyway, we're married now. So it worked. How I got to my style? I'm a weird artist in that everything I do looks a little different.
-- Tony Tasset

#Girl #Art #Real

I try to teach a modernist and postmodernist position. On one hand, if you're a painter, you need to know the history of painting. But I'm also interested in the moment we live in. I love television, and movies, and books, and music. So I also think of art as this cultural production along with all this other stuff that's happening. So that's a kind of postmodern, not media-specific, but the times, what is your art relevant to this moment we live in versus media specificity? That's my teaching philosophy, both of those things are important.
-- Tony Tasset

#Art #Philosophy #Book

The whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.

You can't be without passion. Passion means the possessiveness to be the best.

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech--but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun....

There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a billion people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.

Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where we are going?'. Answer: 'If you didn't know any geography, people would think you were an American, and you wouldn't be able to put them right because you wouldn't know where they live.'

Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . .. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

My idea of the perfect bottom would be nice, bubbly, curvy, firm, maybe a little bit bouncy.