Quote

Asked what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, 'The same role as a good shoe, nothing more.

Georg Baselitz

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Georg Baselitz
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: January 23
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Printmaker
Sculptor
University Teacher
Hans-Georg Kern
Georg Dern
G. Baselitz
Hans-Georg Baselitz
Georg Kern
Hans Georg Kern
Purpose
Replied
Art
Believes
Nothing
Plays
Play
Shoes
Believe
Role
Good
Asked
Roles
Society
Shoe

More quotes by Georg Baselitz

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I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.
Georg Baselitz
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I think the defect actually lies with male artists. Male artists often border on idiocy, while it's important for a woman not to be that way, if possible. Women are outstanding in science, just as good as men.
Georg Baselitz
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The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.
Georg Baselitz
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There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts.
Georg Baselitz
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I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.
Georg Baselitz
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The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.
Georg Baselitz
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In a place like the Guggenheim, I would like to be a representative of arte povera. This would be my ideal.
Georg Baselitz
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Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.
Georg Baselitz
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In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.
Georg Baselitz
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Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.
Georg Baselitz
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I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.
Georg Baselitz
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I don't see art as entertainment.
Georg Baselitz
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The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.
Georg Baselitz
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That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.
Georg Baselitz
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A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.
Georg Baselitz
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Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.
Georg Baselitz
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Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption.
Georg Baselitz
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I started collecting my artist friends, artists like myself who nobody had yet noticed. In everything, all I am collecting, so to speak, are my friends - artist friends.
Georg Baselitz
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I was always on the outside. It was the worst when I still wanted to be a professor, having to deal with colleagues and students, and having to listen to all that academic nonsense. It's really just a haze that keeps them busy. But all of that is fortunately over now, once and for all.
Georg Baselitz
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When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.
Georg Baselitz