Contemporary Art Quotes

( ... ) contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. ( ... ) For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existencial channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests ~ Sarah Thornton

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function. ~ Steve Martin

"Contemporary art" for me is a kind of historical term that describes the 40 years between the Berlin Wall going up and then coming down. I'm not sure who will come up with a better term to describe art, but I think contemporary art is actually done for. ~ Liam Gillick

Apparently, a cleaner at Tate Britain ... threw out a bag of rubbish, accidentally we are told, that was part of an exhibition supposedly emphasizing 'the finite existence of art' ... The cleaner evidently had no time to question the relationship of his or her being to the rubbish bag, and reached the right conclusion. ~ Semir Zeki

The one area that Winkleman avoided was dealing in contemporary art, which Memling described as "shooting poisonous snakes with a water pistol. ~ Hannah Rothschild

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it? ~ David Hockney

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand. ~ Jason Blum

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. ~ Abigail Solomon-Godeau

I've become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital - no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We've come into our own, finally. ~ Eli Broad

The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection. ~ Sarah Thornton

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference. ~ Damien Hirst

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. ~ Susan Sontag

While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art. ~ Ian Hornak

It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating. ~ Kalup Linzy

We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions ... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life ... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. ~ Asger Jorn

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream. ~ Slavoj Zizek

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad. ~ David Edelstein

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters. ~ Sylvester Stallone

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. ~ Donald Judd

I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects. ~ Arman

Contemporary art hates you. ~ John Waters

I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in. ~ John Green

discovered is that I'm an image maker, and I don't care how its made - whether it's through painting or photography or drawing - I just want to create images. ~ James Stanford

The Metropolitan Museum of Art some time ago held a display of contemporary art at which $52,000 was awarded to American sculptors, painters, and artists in allied fields. The award for the best painting went to the canvas of an Illinois artist. It was described as "a macabre, detailed work showing a closed door bearing a funeral wreath." Equally striking was the work's title: "That which I should have done, I did not do." ~ James Keller

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open. ~ Delphine Arnault

...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city? ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The issue is Kinkade's ideology, and particularly his nostalgia; his paintings endlessly trumpet a nonexistent past when times were simpler and morality more pure. There's nothing wrong with this, but it stands at odds with a contemporary art world that looks to the future for inspiration. We value complexity and innovation, and distrust saccharine pictures of the past. ~ Paddy Johnson

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece. ~ Elizabeth Peyton

Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art. ~ John Walford

It is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public ... should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life. ~ Leo Steinberg

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father ... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good. ~ David Rockefeller

In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science. ~ Michael Leunig

We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand. ~ Massimiliano Gioni

What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy. ~ Victor Pinchuk

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated. ~ Grant H. Kester

I cast people from right around me. I was at my alma mater. It's special to have most of the graduate students in it [and] one professor, because I feel like in terms of this school, I was one of the few students lucky enough to break into the art industry or the contemporary art world. ~ Kalup Linzy

Meeting and talking to the artist adds a special element to collecting contemporary art that makes the work an irreplaceable treasure rather than just another possession. ~ Ernest West Basden

To the average eye, my bedroom was a complete disaster. The floor was hardly visible with all of the empty soda bottles, chip bags, and piles of clothes covering it. The rustic nightstand by my bed was so cluttered with papers, more soda bottles, notebooks, and hoodies that it looked like a pile of contemporary art. And my bed? It was just a pile of dark blue blankets and pillows scattered on an old mattress. What's the point in making your bed, anyway? You're just gonna mess it up and unmake it at the end of the day. Why even bother? My bedroom might look like a mess to anyone else, but to me, it was my own personal oasis. I liked it just the way it was. I never bought the whole saying, "A cluttered room is a cluttered mind." Me? Cluttered? Nah. More like creative. The more cluttered your room is, the more creative you are. And judging by my room, I must be pretty creative. I ~ Savannah Ostler

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them. ~ Nuno Roque

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. ~ Peter York

I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity. ~ Cindy Sherman

I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art. ~ Takashi Murakami

Contemporary art and manga - what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators. ~ Takashi Murakami

I had no idea what to expect moving to New York. It's embarrassing to say, but I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art ... that people actually paid for it ... I know that's really dumb. I was really naive. I had no idea artists made money. ~ Wade Guyton

We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life. ~ David Elliott

Much of what was to become modern art and the changed concept of the function of museums was spurred by a cadre of women on the East Coast who changed the face of American museums. Women like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (Whitney Museum of American Art), Lillie Bliss (Museum of Modern Art), and Abby Rockefeller (Museum of Modern Art), contributed their significant influence, wealth, and tireless enthusiasm to promoting contemporary art and artists. ~ Ivy Hendy

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art. ~ Odd Nerdrum

Art is about asking questions and engaging a dialog. By challenging or investigating conventions contemporary art helps promote an on-going sense of discovery, contemplation, and understanding. I think these are all important things. ~ Kim Anderson

The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art ... that people actually paid for it. ~ Wade Guyton

I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house. ~ Bruno Tonioli

For me it's very important to turn Kiev into one of the main centers of contemporary art in the world. There is New York. There's London. And there will be Kiev. Everyone will come and say, 'Wow!' ~ Victor Pinchuk

You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. ~ Michael Scott

There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis. ~ Hans Haacke

The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding. ~ Theaster Gates

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet. ~ Dasha Zhukova

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest. ~ Nouriel Roubini

Most people don't like to be confronted with an actual fact-of-life because it's difficult to metabolize. A painting of a bowl of fruit is much easier. It's for the same reason why we don't like going to the doctor. The diagnosis and x-rays are too honest. This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious. ~ Adamo Macri

In contemporary art or movies, it makes perfect sense to be focused on the bleeding edge, on the new idea that's never been previously contemplated. But when we're discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what's new. ~ Seth Godin

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible. ~ Liam Gillick

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn't quite happen. I guess I'm someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see. ~ Donald Fagen

Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. ~ Eli Broad

The things I'm grateful for are: I had the one thing that I feel really lucky about, which is that I made something, I made art, that truly - in a weird way - truly comforted me and comforted a lot of people. And I'm really grateful that I got to have that experience. ~ David Rees

New York was the glamorous town that you only see now in old movies and on Broadway stages. The sky was lit up with dancing neon signs. It was safe to walk out in the streets. ~ Art Buchwald

What society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system. ~ Elizabeth Janeway

He had a sense - honed by experience - that what he'd contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67] ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. ~ D.T. Max

art is always intense when it's transformative. ~ Aline Ohanesian

The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. It is an ever-moving, firsthand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself. This kind of approach must be seen as the "great art" of working in order to live, of remembering what is most important in the order of priorities and what place we occupy in a much greater story than the one our job description defines. Other "great arts," such as poetry, can remind and embolden us to this end. Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. With a little more care, a little more courage, and, above all, a little more soul, our lives can be so easily discovered and celebrated in work, and not, as now, squandered and lost in its shadow. ~ David Whyte

A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

Bouquet list. You've heard of the Jack Nicholson movie, right? The Bucket List? Two old guys who make a list of everything they want to do before they die. Well, when I was starting to recover, I wrote a list of the things I want to do now that I know I'm not going to die - my bouquet list. ~ Barbara DeLeo

Through depression and many other dark low emotions, our Light dims and our immune system declines along with it. White blood cells are the physical Light of our body.
Colors can be used to heal, restore and to uplift us. ~ Jacqueline Ripstein

What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene. ~ Michael Chabon

That should be the goal for all art, to be as simple as a flashcard. ~ John Baldessari

We do not ask the trees
to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary
to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous,
but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral
all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous,
but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand,
and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. ~ Amy Lowell

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness ... He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. ~ Steven Millhauser

Life is the art from our inner feeling. ~ Jan Jansen

In Britain, chinoiserie was eclipsed by the medievalism of Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Revival, while in Europe japonisme would be chinoiserie's successor. Japonisme never compelled the general middle-class British taste as did the indigenous medieval style. Nonetheless, through extensive importations to Britain of Japanese art and artifacts, notably by the shop Liberty's of London, as well as through the artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect E.W. Godwin, and the writer Oscar Wilde, the Japanese style of decoration was known in Britain well before 1894. ~ Linda Gertner Zatlin

What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them. ~ Orson Scott Card

What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history. ~ James Elkins

I'm adorable, first off. My sense of humor is stellar - obvs."
"Obvs," she echoes dryly.
"I'm extraordinarily skilled in the art of conversation."
She nods. "When it's about yourself, of course."
"Of course." I pretend to think it over some more. "Oh, and I'm a mind reader. No lie. I always know what the other person is thinking."
"Yeah? What am I thinking right now?" Allie challenges.
"That you want me to shut up and fuck you again."
She shakes her head in dismay. "Goddamn it. That's actually what I was thinking."
I smirk at her and tap my forehead. "Told ya. Mind reader. ~ Elle Kennedy

No, darling! To die it's easy ... But you have to stuggle for life! ~ Art Spiegelman

A wide-angle view of sails sparkling white against a cobalt sky as light dances, silver on the water. Like art, it soothes the edge, allowing you to see something simple from a different perspective. ~ Laurie Nadel

It's hard to have a serious conversation with you when you're wearin' lighted cocks on your head."
AJ defiantly thrust out her chin and the penises bobbled. "We aren't having a conversation. You're give me tough-guy attitude. If you won't acknowledge me in public, you don't have the right to chastise me for anything I do in public or in private. And now you lost the right to do anything to me in private either, bucko."
"Quit bein' so goddamm childish."
Her eyes narrowed to silver slits. "Quit bein' such a goddamn dickhead."
"You're the one with dicks on your head, baby doll."
"Yeah? I can take mine off any old time I please, but you wear your dickhead like a second skin. Or should I say as a second foreskin? ~ Lorelei James

She tossed a handful of snow at his face, then shrieked as the wind whipped it back into her own.
Red hooted. "Karma's a boomerang, sweetheart. Don't forget it. ~ Roxanne Snopek

Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy. ~ Agnes Martin

Do you think I would look good in leather?"
His lips lifted in a half smile, "I'm sure they make a bikini top and thong that would be perfect."
Her laugh deepened, "But the hard part will be convincing me to wear it." Savannah weighed her hands in the air up and down like a scale, "Sexy couture in public, absolutely. Trashy, revealing ho
not so much. ~ Beth Mikell

Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill. ~ Terry Crews

Art is not in some far-off place. ~ Lydia Davis

Neil Gaiman's "Make Good Art" commencement speech, which he gave at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. I've watched the video dozens of times on YouTube during rough periods. Our mutual favorite portion is "The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right." And, yes, ~ Timothy Ferriss

To all those whose progress remains hampered by ego-related distractions, let humility - the spiritual cornerstone upon which Karate rests - serve to remind one to place virtue before vice, values before vanity and principles before personalities. ~ Matsumura Sokon

I'm always right, always wrong. Dressing bad's like loving you there is nothing i haven't worn. Nothing, I haven't said before. You are nothing I haven't felt before. ~ Tegan Quin

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. ~ Raymond Chandler

After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He'd turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and ever sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him. ~ Chad Harbach

Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

I never want to make a film. I don't wake up in the morning going, 'Ooh, I'd really love to be on set making a film today'. I'm aware that other contemporary film directors perceive film-making as what they do, as what they have to do. But I would hope that I am more catholic in my tastes. ~ Stephen Daldry

I feel very strongly that history is about everything. It isn't just about politics or the military or social issues. If art, music, engineering, science, medicine, finance, the world of architecture and technology - if those are left out, then you're not getting a full sense of the human condition. History is human and we human beings are involved in all kinds of things and that's part of our humanity. ~ David McCullough

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. ~ Susanne Katherina Langer