Sol LeWitt Quotes

Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.

A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.

New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas.

Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.

You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

You shouldn't be a prisoner of your own ideas.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple

Your work isn't a high stakes, nail-biting professional challenge. It's a form of play. Lighten up and have fun with it.

Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way a viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

I wasn't really that interested in objects. I was interested in ideas.

The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

Minimalism wasn't a real idea - it ended before it started.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.

Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

Minimal art went nowhere.

A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Irrational judgements lead to new experience.

One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.

One should be intelligent enough to know when not to be too intellectual

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns out refrigerators.

I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art

I believe that the artist's involvement in the capitalist structure is disadvantageous to the artist and forces him to produce objects in order to live.

Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.

Formal art is essentially rational.

An architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist.

The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.

The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.