Lucy R. Lippard Quotes

• Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Art, Mean, Ideas

  Lucy R. Lippard (1973). “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ...”, p.7, Univ of California Press

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• Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Travel, People, Energy

  WhiteWalls magazine, Vol. 36-38, p. 45, 1995.

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• I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Art, I've Learned, Critics

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• A piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as 'material' as a ton of lead.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Pieces, Paper, Photograph

  Lucy R. Lippard (1973). “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ...”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• I must admit to a personal lack of sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts and boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come-hither glances.... A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Men, Black, Use

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• Why are we still afraid of being other than men? Women are still in hiding.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Women, Hiding, Stills

  Lucy R. Lippard (1976). “From the center: feminist essays on women's art”, Plume

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• An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Lines, Landscape, Sticks

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• Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Photography, Men, Hunting

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• Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Photography, Real, Lying

  Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Lucy R. Lippard, St. Louis Art Museum (1997). “Defining eye: women photographers of the 20th century : selections from the Helen Kornblum collection”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The camera was another weapon in the wars of domination.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  War, Cameras, Weapons

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• There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Photography, Way, Responding

  Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Lucy R. Lippard, St. Louis Art Museum (1997). “Defining eye: women photographers of the 20th century : selections from the Helen Kornblum collection”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media's misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Views, Media, Political

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• Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I.

  Lucy R. Lippard

  Beautiful, Reading, Skills

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