A Quote by John Ciardi

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

John Ciardi

Quote Topics

Art Art Is Better Happens Idea Looking Modern Modern Art Painters Persuade Stop Themselves

Quote Author

John Ciardi
English - Dramatist
June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we’re living in. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.

Jackson Pollock

The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

Jackson Pollock

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

Our challenge is to stop people from driving drunk. Punishing them afterwards doesn't bring back the victim or make the family feel better. The idea is to stop the DWI before it happens.

Pete Gallego

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

J. G. Ballard

Too many modern painters set themselves satisfied with just a coincidence, the spot in its raw, meaningless form.

Pierre Alechinsky

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

Billy Childish

Many adult bullies hide behind the idea that bullying happens only among children. They conceive of themselves as adults who know better and are offering their hard-earned wisdom to others. The Internet makes that sort of certainty easier to attain: looking at their screens, adult bullies rarely see the impact of their words and actions.

Maria Konnikova

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

Joshua Reynolds

The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my art is better than your art, at being what it is.

Derek R. Audette

The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn't like themselves.

Claudette Colvin

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

There's that whole thing that happens in relationships - you can love someone but, as soon as they stop loving you so unconditionally that they stop being themselves, it can be so dangerous.

Justin Vernon

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences... That solves a lot of problems ... Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen ... [W]hat makes a work of art 'good' for you is not something that is already 'inside' it, but something that happens inside you.