Top 50 Carl Andre Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.”

— Carl Andre

2. “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist’s work is not the artist’s work.”

— Carl Andre

3. “A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.”

— Carl Andre

4. “Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!”

— Carl Andre

5. “SoHo was called Hell’s Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops – without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.”

— Carl Andre

6. “Why carve? It’s a better sculpture that way. I’ll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.”

— Carl Andre

7. “I’ve often stopped working for long periods.”

— Carl Andre

8. “We don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it.”

— Carl Andre

9. “I grew up in a brick house. What’s wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, “You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish.””

— Carl Andre

10. “Art is an intersection of many human needs.”

— Carl Andre

11. “New York is dead. It’s too expensive.”

— Carl Andre

12. “Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist.”

— Carl Andre

13. “People are always trading their excess for somebody else’s excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It’s the law of supply and demand.”

— Carl Andre

14. “The wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way.”

— Carl Andre

15. “That’s wonderful, but my mind has been destroyed by alcohol.”

— Carl Andre

16. “The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail – which is a good thing. Who’d want to live in a perfect world?”

— Carl Andre

17. “My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.”

— Carl Andre

18. “Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.”

— Carl Andre

19. “Money is a very complicated problem. The history of money is very curious.”

— Carl Andre

20. “You could own coins but you couldn’t have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.”

— Carl Andre

21. “A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.”

— Carl Andre

22. “I was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.”

— Carl Andre

23. “You can always find somebody to beat up. This goes back to the schoolyard. Most men would think, Don’t chum with girls. But I chummed with girls.”

— Carl Andre

24. “It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.”

— Carl Andre

25. “I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space – like a negative – and so it made an endless column, only inward.”

— Carl Andre

26. “I believe that woman are superior to men.”

— Carl Andre

27. “I’m afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.”

— Carl Andre

28. “It seems with progress you gain certain things and you lose certain things. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy but you lost all of that nice manure.”

— Carl Andre

29. “Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.”

— Carl Andre

30. “An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.”

— Carl Andre

31. “Americans understand better than the Europeans and the English that any publicity is good.”

— Carl Andre

32. “I mean, art for art’s sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one’s needs.”

— Carl Andre

33. “I had no place to put anything. I would give my sculpture away because I had no place to put it.”

— Carl Andre

34. “If you’re any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.”

— Carl Andre

35. “What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.”

— Carl Andre

36. “My works have always been unjoined. People were always making variations of my works, and I just said, “I don’t want to know.” You can’t put limits on those pieces. You can’t be there all of the time when they’re installed.”

— Carl Andre

37. “I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, “I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child.” I think that’s what art is about.”

— Carl Andre

38. “Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.”

— Carl Andre

39. “I’m a feminist. I’ve always been in favor of women.”

— Carl Andre

40. “I think my work is very American because I’m American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.”

— Carl Andre

41. “The girls you picked up from the bars were not the girls you took home to mother.”

— Carl Andre

42. “I’ve never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That’s when you discover yourself.”

— Carl Andre

43. “When I came to New York, it was cheap!”

— Carl Andre

44. “Isn’t it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?”

— Carl Andre

45. “I didn’t study the piano – the piano studied me.”

— Carl Andre

46. “My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.”

— Carl Andre

47. “I was hanging out and drinking as long as I could afford it, or as long as somebody else could afford it.”

— Carl Andre

48. “If you forge a Carl Andre, it’s just another Carl Andre. It’s not like a Vermeer.”

— Carl Andre

49. “Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.”

— Carl Andre

50. “I didn’t like men, but I liked women.”

— Carl Andre