“Art is just fraud. You just have to do something nobody else has done before.”

—  Nam June Paik

In interview with a Korean newspaper, quoted in: KoreAm Journal, Vol. 17 (2006), p. 79
1970s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Art is just fraud. You just have to do something nobody else has done before." by Nam June Paik?
Nam June Paik photo
Nam June Paik 10
American video art pioneer 1932–2006

Related quotes

Paramahansa Yogananda photo

“You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that God's creative principle works in you.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

“The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.”

Russell Lynes (1910–1991) American art historian

Reader's Digest, December 1954

Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

As quoted in The Federal Career Service: A Look Ahead (1954)
1950s
Variant: Now I think, speaking roughly, by leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Eating Animals (2009)

Benjamin Franklin photo

“The mind is always asking you to do something over again, something you have already done so many times before. And every time you see that by doing it nothing is achieved. What else can madness be?”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Misattributed

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be. The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us. In this matter we only possess a negative freedom of will, a noluntas.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of our destiny. … Theoretic truths not only are disputable, but their whole meaning and force lie in their being disputed, they spring from discussion. They live as long as they are discussed, and they are made exclusively for discussion. But destiny — what from a vital point of view one has to be or has not to be — is not discussed, it is either accepted or rejected. If we accept it, we are genuine; if not, we are the negation, the falsification of ourselves. Destiny does not consist in what we feel we should like to do; rather is it recognised in its clear features in the consciousness that we must do what we do not feel like doing.
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

Related topics