Henry Flynt quotes

Basically, I viewed any work of art as an imposition of another person's taste, and saw the individual making this imposition as a kind of dictator. (Henry Flynt)

Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.

Henry Flynt

When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating.

Henry Flynt

Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e. g. music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.

Henry Flynt

My early work was philosophic, what would be called epistemology, I was convinced I'd dicredited cognition. When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating. I had to find a way to frame this insight which was not self-defeating and that's in "Blueprint", the essay entitled "The Flaws Underlying Beliefs." One has to do what Wittgenstein claimed to do in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," which is to use the ladder and then throw it away. The way I devolved, moved out from, this position of strict cognitive nihilism, was with the idea of building a new culture which would depart profoundly from the scientific culture in which we live.

Henry Flynt

I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made.

Henry Flynt

I'm actually a great fan of lucidity.

Henry Flynt

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

Henry Flynt

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

Henry Flynt

When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

Henry Flynt

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms. (Henry Flynt)

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

Henry Flynt

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

Henry Flynt

I surmise that mathematical knowledge amounts to the crystallization of officially endorsed delusions in an intellectual quicksand.

Henry Flynt

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

Henry Flynt

When I came to New York, I began to meet the people who became the most famous artists of our time. I was insecure about my own level of ability, I didn't know whether I could compete with these people and, at the same time. I was wondering what is this anyway?

Henry Flynt

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

Henry Flynt

Concept art was meant to replace all of mathematics with an endeavor which involved a Rorschach-blot semantics; and which did not claim to be cognitive, at least not in the inherited sense. Mathematics had already been disconnected from claims of realism; and I was extending that disavowal to a disconnection from claims of a priori truth. Concept art's value consisted in beauty, a beauty which was non-sentimental. Later I would say that its value consisted in "the invention of new mental abilities."

Henry Flynt

I have a picture of an ideal consciousness.

Henry Flynt