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I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.

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
Grows
Knowing
Art

More quotes by 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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My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying I was remaking them as my own.
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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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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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
Claes Oldenburg
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I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
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 had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.
Claes Oldenburg
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I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
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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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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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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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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Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
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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I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
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For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
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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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
Claes Oldenburg
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Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg