There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, ‘New Museum,’ to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency. Richard Phillips Read Quote
When we can’t determine what is art – when you get to that point where we’re not sure, that’s the greatest likelihood that we’re actually experiencing something great. But I think that’s what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don’t know how to assign evaluation, whether it’s cultural or otherwise. Richard Phillips Read Quote
My work, in a certain way, got started in 1996 when I did an exhibition of thirteen paintings that were solely based on fashion imagery. Richard Phillips Read Quote
For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse. Richard Phillips Read Quote
Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show… maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure. Richard Phillips Read Quote
Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present. Richard Phillips Read Quote
Technically, a makeup artist’s canvas is the face and body. The difference is that my painting of makeup is integrated into the painting of the flesh and not on top of it. I think in some ways it is more difficult to expressively deploy makeup. Richard Phillips Read Quote
I try to get out of an image’s way in order to let it articulate what is hidden. Richard Phillips Read Quote
