Art Quote by Buffy Sainte-Marie

She’s drawing a line in the sand, then immediately showing why it no longer matters. By framing “the old days” as a world of “two distinct categories,” Buffy Sainte-Marie taps into a familiar gatekeeping reflex in the art world: photography as capture, painting as craft; mechanical witness versus handmade aura. The phrasing is deliberately blunt and a little funny. “Applied stuff onto other stuff” flattens centuries of reverence for fine art technique into a tactile, almost childlike description, puncturing prestige. It’s a demystification strategy: if painting is just material transfer, then the hierarchy that props it up starts to look arbitrary.

The subtext is about permission and power. Sainte-Marie isn’t only talking about tools; she’s talking about who gets counted as an artist, and how institutions police legitimacy by medium. Photography has long been treated as suspect because the camera “does” some of the work; meanwhile, brushwork is fetishized as proof of authenticity. Her sentence flips that bias by reminding you that all image-making is mediated. A camera is a tool; a brush is a tool. Both turn choices into surfaces.

Contextually, this lands in a moment when digital workflows, collage, projection, AI, and mixed media have collapsed those tidy bins. As an artist who’s moved across music, activism, and visual practice, Sainte-Marie’s intent reads like a defense of hybridity: stop asking what category the work belongs to and start asking what it’s doing. The wit is the lever that pries open a more radical claim: medium purity was never a neutral description; it was a social boundary.