Chris Maybach's Art City

Some quotes from Chris Maybach's Art City (1996) -

Pat Steir - "every day when I go to the studio ... (I'm) insecure or elated at the end of each day and that feeling the next morning changes, what I was elated about the night before I can be insecure about that morning"

"It's a strange time for art, now. I think it's a time that people prefer hard labor to genius attacks, you know? The audience wants to see something worked on, that looked like a lot of work. They don't want to see a genius attack at the end of the century. It's too threatening."

She has a good laugh.

Ashley Bickerton - "The artists I most envy in this world are the ones that actually like working, they wake up and they go to their studio and it's pleasure.

It comes and it goes. That's the process of... artmaking."

Elizabeth Murray - "I don't really... try.. to.. think about them. I try to just do, to act on them."

"I like to tussle with them. I like that feeling of them being.. battles."

Emma Amos - "I think it's a political statement for an artist, for a black artist, to walk into the studio, because basically, nobody gives a damn."

"People I've seen who've had that early early early success, uh, have burnt out so fast. So, in a way I think early success is just as dificult as having to wait."

Brice Marden - "I do find that negative criticism is the most interesting criticism... for me. It's what tends to stick with you."

George McNeil - "How old am I? I'm eighty-six. I've been ill for the last two years, so I work two, or three hours a day, and sometimes if I'm not feeling well I just go into the studio and sit there and look at my pictures."

"I have something of a shoe, and a leg, fixation. A nice old man like me."

"Normally, a painter comes into, uh, his or her greatest strength when their about fifty-five, or sixty-five, but I wouldn't say to any eighteen year old student, what you're doing now is fine, but you'll have to wait until you're fifty-five. I wouldn't say that at all, because the same kind of effort made at fifty-five is what she's doing at eighteen."

"Long ago, I realized that there was going to be a certain kind of.. jousting.. between the painting and myself."

Neil Jenney - "I believe that you only have so much energy each day and you really have to put it all in one direction, and.. it's a big mistake to have full-time employment, it's a big mistake to have a wife and a family... before.. you know.. you've made the work."

"If you can't talk about your work you don't know where you're at."

Louise Bourgeouis - "As you grow more successful you don't have to spare the feelings of everybody, very specially the critics, and you can say what you think."

"The cluttering of the... and all the pressure that I feel under. This pressure that I will never have enough time to do what I want to do. So if I do not have enough time then I have a tendency to keep it for tomorrow."

Ivan Karp - "An artist who reaches out into an audience is going to make much more rapid progress in his or her career than an artist who decides to hang around the studio all day long and wait for something good to happen to him or her. It's not necessarily the merit of your achievement that's going to make it happen for you."

"Some of the artists of the most remarkable talent get practically no attention from the art community, while other artists of very little consequence get a great deal of public attention."

"All artists of course are innately ambitious or it just wouldn't work for them, and we think it's a critical factor in an artist's character to retain that surge of ambition. It doesn't work otherwise, you know."

Jay Gorney - "One wants to have a balance of men and women, and artists of color... and on the other hand, you can't run a gallery or create a program with an eye solely to statistics."

I'll update this later.

UPDATE: Anna Conti wrote about this last year!