Nate Lowman

“Architecture is a discourse; everything is a discourse. Fashion discourse is actually a micro-discourse, because it's centered around the body. It is the most rapidly developing form of discourse.”

“I think that fashion is industrial, whereas style is ideological. So they're not necessarily connected.”

“A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like 'I'm happy! I swear!' I'm not buying it.”

“Dead people don't really die. They live on within you.”

“It's a shame when other people's gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it's too expensive to be interesting or moving. That's when I get bummed out.”

“I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. It could be from a newspaper, on the street. It could be something I fell over.”

“I do not connect fashion to elegance. Elegance is in the wilderness, and fashion is in the domestic.”

“I'm not a pessimist at all, but I'm not an optimist, either.”

“I'm really interested in the difference between selfishness and generosity. It confuses me to no end because sometimes it all just feels like pure indulgence on my part.”

“I don't have a great imagination to share something with you that you don't know, so it's about interpreting things - a dialogue.”

“I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.”

“When you mix fashion and politics, you get fascism. Politics have fashion, and it's bad; fashion has politics, that are ugly.”

“I love language, and I love the failure of language.”

“A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they've already been talked about, already been consumed.”

“I do believe that I will see the apocalypse in my lifetime. And when it comes, I'm not repenting for anything I've done.”

“To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.”

“I think of other artists as generous when I get inspired by their work. That's why I like curating. You don't want to take someone else's art and have your way with it. You've got to be respectful of them.”