Quotes by Vik Muniz - Page 1

Garbage is the part of your history you don't want your family to know about.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Garbage
Family History Your
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Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Drawing
Photograph
Tired
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The great challenge is how to make smart, intelligent art that can speak to everybody.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
Challenges
Intelligent
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If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Form
Ideas
Let Me
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I think pure light has something to do with actually seeing everything at once. It's kind of a nirvana of sorts.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Kind
Light
Thinking
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A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Intention
Littles
Looks
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Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Illusion
Information
People
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Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Creation
Meaningful
Pointless
Seems
Bit
Cope
While
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The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment. A combination of sounds turns into music. And that applies to everything.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Beautiful
Moments
Sound
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I'm a student of media and I've always been one. I'm fascinated by the way we make the world around us based on pictures and how can we improve our perception of this picture world.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Media
Perception
World
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Gramacho is the last landfill that allows people in. Brazil is the leading nation in recycling due to its poverty. There are people there surviving from what they find in the garbage.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Brazil
Garbage
Poverty
Recycling
Surviving
Due
Landfill
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It's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Giving
Inspiration
Motivation
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When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Fall
Mean
Reality
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I think there's a gradient that goes from science to art and magic is the middle ground. I think that we're all trying to understand and define the world around us but often it's experimental.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
Magic
Thinking
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In the back of every painting there's an entire universe that makes it possible for the painting to be there: an army of conservators, technicians, people who maintain these things, the market.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Army
Painting
People
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I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
Creating
Ethics
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My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Believe
Book
Jetty
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The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Beauty
Intention
Looking
Bit
Front
Happen
Magical
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Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce's view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Saint
Taken
Views
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Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
Dark
Empowering
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I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Trust
Censorship
Communicate
Dictatorship
Flexible
Information
Military
Because
Very
Dispense
Double
Freely
Learn
Meanings
Metaphors
Product
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I think most people have creative ideas and have very strange, unorthodox impulses of things that they can do with their lives. I've had many of these over the years, but I decided the more important question was, 'When did I start calling this art?'
Vik Muniz / Artist
Unorthodox
Important Question
Impulses
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My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Syllables
Time Me Long
Time Long Me
Entered
Herself
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Who wouldn't like to give up normal life? I mean, normal life, you know, is the second worst thing to death itself. I think normality is something that makes everything very static, and I try to make my days, my daily routines, as uneven and rich as possible.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Death
Normal
Normal Life
Rich
Static
Worst
Days
Possible
Itself
Daily
Routines
Second
Uneven
Worst Thing
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I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Confused
Hate
Photography
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I think I'm an ambitious artist but you have to understand the measure of your influence on people. You're not going to change people's lives with your art. What you do is you give them a little pat so that you change the course of the direction that they're going.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
People
Thinking
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I'm at this point in my career where I'm trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it's a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Exclusive
Fine Arts
Materials
Arts
Realm
Restrictive
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Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Visual
Draw
Economical
Organizing
Examine
Frequently
Hierarchical
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Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Photography
Thinking
Way
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I took the longest showers of my life after every time I visited Gramacho. It affects the personality of the catadores. They always dress really well, they're very sharp, and when they go out they always wear a lot of perfume because they're very conscious of the possibility of having the smell.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Conscious
Perfume
Possibility
Showers
Smell
Affects
Life Time Personality
Longest
Sharp
Visited
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The first five minutes in Gramacho is really overwhelming because all of your senses are being attacked. Visually, too, because your eyes move and see fragments of things you recognize, but not quite, so it's very artistic. Your eyes are moving, then there's the smell, and the noise is unbearable.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Artistic
Five
Fragments
Minutes
Noise
Overwhelming
Senses
Smell
Unbearable
Eyes Your See
Attacked
Eyes
Recognize
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I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Brazil
Communicate
Distress
Forced
Invent
Market
Specific
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The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Chuck
Surface
Colors
Photographed
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My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very - actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to - to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Agency
Angle
Approach
Billboards
Brazil
Decided
Give Me
Speed
Study
Ugly
Ad
Good Me Way
Based
Blocks
Develop
First Job
Text
Trophy
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Every time you show something to somebody they're going in one direction, when they see that thing you did they're going to go off track - maybe towards a direction that you think is more important. They'll be more discerning, they'll probably see things a little bit more profoundly, they'll spend more time trying to understand what's in front of them.
Vik Muniz / Artist
One Direction
Thinking
Track
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When you organize your work and look back at your entire production, it may feel like you're looking at a straight line, but in fact it's nothing like that. The work is very experimental and most of the time it develops like branches. I usually see a capillary, like a tree shape where there are... branches that sort of move because you're not tending to them.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Facts
Moving
Tree
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Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."
Vik Muniz / Artist
Artist
Eye
Thinking
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I don't want to fool people. If I wanted to do that, I would be working with virtual reality. I want to operate on the other level, the other end of the illusion spectrum. I want to create the worst possible illusions so it doesn't really fool people, but instead give people a measure of their own belief. It makes them aware of how much they need to be fooled in order to understand the world around them.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Order
People
Reality
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I think art is the development of this interface between mind and matter, between mind and phenomenon, between what's inside of us and what's happening outside of us. It developed over the course of the last 35,000 years. We made a lot of improvements because it not only gave us the tools to understand the world better, but it also gave us better and better tools to do it. It's that continuous relationship: technology and discernment.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Art
Technology
Thinking
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I think that the development of any culture has something to do with the way people deal with the concept of illusion. The fact that the sound of my voice and the way I modulate it creates pictures in your head... in order for us to accumulate knowledge, we have to create symbolic exchanges that let ourselves be fooled temporarily by something that's not there - by a substitute for reality. When you talk about representation, you're talking about language.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Reality
Thinking
Voice
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We need saints; we need this head - this talking head - to communicate. Every single religion you have people that go in-between, that can talk to god or communicate ideas. Then there are the talking heads in the news every time we watch TV. No matter how complex, you still need a person there to tell you what happened: a storyteller of sorts. I find that fascinating that we feel so attached to this primitive mode of connection, this primitive interface to the world.
Vik Muniz / Artist
Ideas
People
Talking
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Vik Muniz Quotes - Page 1

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