Even if it's only his view of a meaning. Interview in Writers at Work , Second Series, edited by George Plimpton, 1963. Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation.
Art is the laboratory for making new men.
Discovering the Present , part 4, chapter 24, 1973. Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification. All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.