Jeff Koons Quotes

“A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.”

“A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box – to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.”

“Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.”

“Art helped give me confidence.”

“Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.”

“Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.”

“Art was something I could do better. It gave me a sense of self.”

“Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.”

“As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.”

“Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.”

“Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.”

“Feelings are at the basis of all ideas. First you have feelings, and then, through those sensations, it develops into ideas.”

“For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.”

“From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.”

“I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.”

“I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.”

“I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.”

“I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.”

“I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.”

“I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.”

“I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.”

“I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.”

“I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.”

“I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.”

“I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.”

“I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.”

“I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.”

“I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.”

“I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.”

“I think about my work every minute of the day.”