Top 1200 Modern Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.

I'm always fighting either to have a house work with us or to head a house. It's a lifestyle I can totally see: the future, modern Versailles, modern Versace, modern Calabasas, paparazzi, celebrity language. I just want to build a collection that's around me and my wife and my kids.

I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.

At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.

Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving... in the contemporary world, we have come to expect instant response and immediate understanding.

I collect furniture and modern art. And I never go to any parties. I rather prefer to go around in nature.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.

By bringing Little Sun to Tate Modern and the London Olympics, I hope to realise an art project for those who typically have no access to global events of this scale.

I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.

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

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

The divide between me and the modern world is growing further because I to a larger degree manage to rid myself of my dependence on the modern world. If the modern world collapsed tomorrow I would be fine, and I see so many others who would not be.

Art is the distortion of an unendurable reality... Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection... Art is social, self-sufficient, and total.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.

For goodness sakes, beware of curls… It is a great art to do them so that the girls not only look modern - but do not suddenly look very vulgar.

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

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.

It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'

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

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

When you objectively observe the most spiritual area to which modern people devote themselves, the religions, ask yourself if the basis of modern culture, particularly in religion, is not human self-interest. It is typical of modern sermons that the preacher criticizes people for their selfishness.

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

I watched L'eclisse [1962] with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. Changed my world. What a glamorous and modern film. This is what a genius is - the thing of a genius. The dresses, the tiny heels, the Cardin look, the boys dressed up as Italian gigolos - it was divine, very modern. [Michelangelo] Antonioni, I loved and I realized: how modern.

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

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

Museum of Modern Art doesn't have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn't be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don't have a measuring device.

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual.

Art is supposed to change and grow and accord with the times. It seems perfect to me that we have a period drama with a core of modern times.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

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.

The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

I would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.