Modern Art Quotes

Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn't. ~ Craig Damrauer

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. ~ Susan Sontag

Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? ~ Milan Kundera

That is why my pictures don't look like modern art. It's some sort of timidity on my part I'm sure. ~ Paula Rego

They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought. ~ David Rockefeller

You'll pay for making Genos look like modern art! Lead the way! ~ ONE

If I were silent and invisible, I'd fear nobody. And if I were tasteless too, not even the cannibals or modern art critics would touch me. ~ Jarod Kintz

I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese. ~ Larry Ellison

I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail. ~ Vito Acconci

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. ~ Egon Schiele

What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth? ~ Italo Calvino

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ Salvador Dali

During [Erté]'s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century …

In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company …

It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an o ~ Charles Spencer

Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. ~ Antony Gormley

MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists. ~ Robert Hughes

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between. ~ Robert Hughes

I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They're very efficient. They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers. ~ Sylvia Earle

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I love art; I collect mostly modern art. ~ Alan Patricof

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

I've always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists. ~ Donald J. Trump

A sport, a struggle for results and a fight for prizes. I think that the discussion about "chess is science or chess is art" is already inappropriate. The purpose of modern chess is to reach a result. ~ Alexander Morozevich

Ah yes, you like to cook, don't you?
well, i used to. you need real dedication. fresh ingredients, a discerning palate, an eye for presentation. it's not a modern art. good cooking has hardly evolved since the nineteenth century. ~ Haruki Murakami

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art. ~ Mike Curran

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low. ~ Jerry Saltz

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. ~ Max Eastman

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact. ~ Theodor Adorno

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. ~ Paul Gauguin

Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual - the Orientals did that. ~ Jackson Pollock

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste. ~ David Rockefeller

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. ~ Jackson Pollock

I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art. ~ Jerry Pinkney

Painting is ... a correspondence between what you are and what you see. It's a moment when something is holding together in such a way that it is a universe in itself ... Within this is a test and also a judgment upon yourself, your capabilities, your promises, and the part that you play in the world. And nobody else can test that for you. Certainly not the Museum of Modern Art. ~ Milton Resnick

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern. ~ Louise Bourgeois

That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art ... ~ Joseph Heller

Inside the glittery, swanky cases-the 'modern art' materials that were all the rage at the time, Formica and glass and plastic-was something very unpleasant, very frightening, and looking absolutely real. ~ Paul Thek

Sudenly Garge spring up and walk to the wall to admire some modarn art hanging on Frank and Estele Catandas wall. Hes impressed. Frank and Estele have always had a traditienel sensibility when it come to aesthetic matter's. For as long as he knew it, this space on the wall was ocupied by a Normen Rockwell print of a smileing child with a cast on his arm eating a handful of bird seed out of the hand of the postman. But now its replace with this minimelist art work, a large black rectangle. He make out hes bald reflectien in the imposibly smooth black surfece. It look like something that should be hang in the Moma (Museum Of Modarn Art).
"This is beauteful," Garge remark. "It seem like a stark comentary on the end of art. Who designe this?"
"Not art," Frank go. "Thats a televisien. ~ Seinfeld 2000

Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. ~ G.K. Chesterton

When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage.

This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason. ~ John Russell

I have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words. ~ Andrea Bocelli

I always thought martial arts was the most modern choreography we could have right now, and I always wanted to put it to music. ~ Lou Reed

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art. ~ Arnold Hauser

Impressionism was not just a style of painting, it was a new attitude to art and life; it is this attitude that marks the beginning of modern art. ~ Neville Weston

The painters have no copyright on modern art! ... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims. ~ Edward Weston

I don't know much about modern art, but I guess I am modern art. ~ Gloria Trevi

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art ~ Daniel H. Pink

The couple had lunch the next day and then went to the White Cube, a modern art gallery, and then back to Musk's hotel room. Musk told Riley, a virgin, that he wanted to show her his rockets. "I was skeptical, but he did actually show me rocket videos, ~ Ashlee Vance

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. ~ Golda Meir

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ... ~ Herbert Read

Realism without naturalism... is a leading motif in Modern Art. There is a move away from the struggle to perfect the reflection of Nature in Art's mirror, which I attribute to the all-pervading effects of photography...You must serve the tradition without being its slave. Remember you are an artist, not a draughtsman. ~ Tom Holt

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment. ~ Natasha Pulley

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art. ~ Paul McCartney

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves. ~ Alain Badiou

Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status. ~ Peter Landesman

I think a lot of modern art is complete bullshit. But I admire the creativity. The weird shit people think of! Some of the most interesting things I've ever seen in my life, I've seen in modern art museums. And that's what art is all about. It's supposed to make you think. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate. ~ Oscar Wilde

There is an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old one is directed towards the individual. The new one is directed towards the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal may be seen both in the world war and in modern art. ~ Theo Van Doesburg

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period. ~ Edward Hopper

The No. 1 quote critics give me is, 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to 10 million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture. ~ Thomas Kinkade

If we are to redeem any part of our world from the brute march of power, we may have to begin as modern art does by exalting some of the humble and dirty little corners of existence. ~ William Barrett

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone. ~ Piet Mondrian

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected. ~ Herbert Read

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah.' And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at. ~ John Baldessari

Modern art is childish - not childlike, remember, childish; not innocent but stupid, insane, pathological. We have to get rid of this trend. We have to create a new kind of art, a new kind of creativity. We have to bring to the world again what Gurdjieff calls objective art. ~ Rajneesh

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image. ~ Christopher Lasch

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. ~ D.H. Lawrence

On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work. ~ C. D. Innes

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. ~ Orhan Pamuk

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins. ~ Antoni Tapies

As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter. ~ Maureen Callahan

I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page. ~ Jim Lee

Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano. Modern art [by Salvador Dali]. ~ Joan Wehlen Morrison

The modern artist ... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. ~ Jackson Pollock

I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards. ~ Nicholas Sparks

We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become 'experience', transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible. ~ Anonymous

There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations. ~ Hans Hofmann

As the spiral of modern art history continues to wind down, we can see the increasing demand for tradition in the visual arts. ~ Igor Babailov

I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art. ~ Jean-Francois Chevrier

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

War is the highest form of modern art. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art. ~ Kenneth Clark

Her eyes narrowed as she realised just what Ian was. "You're a filthy Debasement!"
"Maybe. But damned if I'm the one eating kiddie-snacks in the middle ofnowhere while admiring modern art. ~ Stephen Hunt

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. ~ Saul Bellow

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask. ~ Robert Motherwell

Modern art must strike out from the old. The new is not revealed to those whose eyes are fastened in worship upon the old ... Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing. ~ Albert Pinkham Ryder

A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw. ~ Robert Henri

Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that. ~ Banksy

So that's our approach. Very simple, and we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple." Apple's design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~ Walter Isaacson

The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music. ~ Neville Weston

People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. ~ Bill Watterson

I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film. ~ Akira Kurosawa

I love the idea of modern art in a home that isn't totally modern. There's a certain energy that comes out of that juxtaposition. ~ Darren Star

Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval. ~ Edward Weston

I think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money. ~ Roger Corman

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. ~ Amit Chaudhuri

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world . ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst. ~ Joyce Cary