29 Quotes by Henry Flynt

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I was trying to be up with the latest thing. To a point, I just took what I was offered, logical positivism in philosophy.

Another point I made was that black American music was a new language, and I don't feel this was ever really acknowledged.

The way I devolved, moved out from, this position of strict cognitive nihilism, was with the idea of building a new culture.

The stuff being promoted as serious culture and performed in the Lincoln Centre was absolutely worthless. There was no real emotion in it, the possibility of ingenuous experience had been replaced by an ideology of science and scientism.