Robert Longo Quotes

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

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.

The artist has to be a guardian of the culture.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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?

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.