There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.
I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.
Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.
I would have been completely brainwashed by this lopsided and racist view of the world if it weren't for my father. He was a deep thinker and an irrepressible problem solver. He was a Black Socrates, asking why and then spoiling ready-made replies.
I hate ready-made suits, button-down collars, and sports shirts.
When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.
Seventy percent store-bought, ready-made plus 30 percent fresh allows you to take 100 percent of the credit.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.