CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/25/2013

Frank Stella

In Hatje Cantz’s major new monograph on Frank Stella, published on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, Claudia Bodin asks, “What is good art?” Stella replies, “Does art have to be good, or when does something stop being art is the real question. How long can the level be? There’s a guy who sells paintings on my street corner. They are as bad as anything you can imagine. But I like them, and they are still art for me. Picasso once bought a painting at a flea market and everyone was asking: What do you want to do with that? He answered: ‘If I don’t love this poor painting, who will?’ In the case of art, what is important is the will to express oneself. And people do this in all kinds of ways. I don’t believe that art strives for something higher. Maybe art is best when it’s about personal expression.” Featured image, "Grodno III" (1973), is reproduced from Frank Stella.