Brad Holland

“The only people left in America who seem not to be artists are illustrators.”

“All the other kids in ninth grade were drawing hot rods and cocker spaniels and getting blue ribbons in art class. I was getting rejection slips from the 'Saturday Evening Post.'”

“Your biggest influences are the earliest ones. When I was young, I was very influenced by the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

“Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.”

“The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.”

“Art imitates life. Life imitates high school.”

“I didn't want to go to college - I was bored by junior high. So I was in church one day, staring at the stained glass windows and thinking about things, when suddenly I decided that if I could start selling cartoons to magazines, they'd let me quit high school.”

“Fifty years ago, it was the dream of every bohemian artist to be seen getting out of a limousine wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Today, it's the dream of probably half the people in the country.”

“Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it's stranger than non-fiction as well.”

“Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.”

“Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.”

“In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'”

“Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.”

“Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.”

“In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.”

“I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.”

“I don't get ideas, I have them. The trick is to remember where I've put them.”

“Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.”

“In aristocratic societies, rich people used to commission exquisite paintings for their walls.”

“Commercial art is traditionally delivered to a client in a brown-paper bag with an invoice stapled to the outside.”