I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering.
I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.
I can't pretend that I'm a great student of the art of comedy because anybody that becomes philosophical about humour doesn't know what he's talking about.
I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.
Growing up, I found I was good at two things: Art and Math. To hear my parents say it, though, it was only, 'John is good at Math.'
The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
Our Father which art in heaven - Stay there - And we will stay on earth - Which is sometimes so pretty.
In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes.
The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.
I dropped out of school for a semester, transferred to another college, switched to an art major, graduated, got married, and for a while worked as a graphic designer.
It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes....
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.
Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.
When I sing, I have to live in that moment, so my audience can feel that. That is my reason for doing art.
The highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys, whatever, it's all going to go into the art, whether I'm singing or acting or whatever.
I want to try and be as involved in the art of filmmaking as possible. I feel that the only way to really do that is to take on as many roles as possible, whether it be as an actor, an editor, a director, a cinematographer.
My father was invited to play on a television show when I was 17 or 18 that was an early equivalent of educational television, a Sunday afternoon kind of variety art show.
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
I have never been sorry to see my sets being struck, provided they are well photographed. They're not works of art but part of making a film.
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
