Experimental Art Quotes

“Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

— Jonah Lehrer

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

— John Ashbery

“I cared nothing; my point of view in that instance, as in all others like it, was, that if the paper chose to send an outsider and an ignoramus to criticise works of art - especially the works of a new and tentative and experimental school - then, on the head of the paper let the just doom fall.”

— Arthur Machen

“The Way of Bayes is also an imprecise art, at least the way I'm holding forth upon it. These blog posts are still fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there's underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you into interesting new mistakes.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.”

— Peter C. Doherty

“I wanted to study film at an art school - I loved the idea of being surrounded by designers and artists. We were encouraged to be experimental.”

— Asif Kapadia

“It's been said that horror films are experimental forms of art, and I agree. As an actress, you're put in positions and have to experience emotions that are way beyond reality, whether fighting in a post-apocalyptic world or being possessed by the Devil.”

— Ashley Bell

“People talk about making art films - experimental films. I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What's difficult is to combine a commercial film with art.”

— Carlo Ponti

“I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.”

— Harvey Pekar

“Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.”

— Robert Longo

“Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere. It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built.”

— Martin Lewis Perl

“In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology ... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You say I sucked at the Oscars. I was a genius at the Oscars. That was experimental tuxedo sleep art.”

— James Franco

“I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?”

— Nicolas Cage

“Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.”

— John Cage

“Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.”

— George Santayana

“Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I'm a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn't resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There's just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out.”

— Guy Maddin

“As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.”

— Will Self

“To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.”

— Claude Bernard