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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.

Claes Oldenburg

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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Time
Ladies
Tells
Helps
Street
Across
Streets
Helping
Art

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

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Food is like clay you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
Claes Oldenburg
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You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.
Claes Oldenburg
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I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
Claes Oldenburg
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Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
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I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
Claes Oldenburg
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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.
Claes Oldenburg
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Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.
Claes Oldenburg
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Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.
Claes Oldenburg
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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
Claes Oldenburg
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Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
Claes Oldenburg
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Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
Claes Oldenburg
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I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.
Claes Oldenburg
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In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.
Claes Oldenburg
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They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, Why don't you show the other stuff? I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.
Claes Oldenburg
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I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.
Claes Oldenburg
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It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Claes Oldenburg
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My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.
Claes Oldenburg
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The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
Claes Oldenburg
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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Claes Oldenburg
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I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg