Quotes About Contemporary Art

#1. The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

Agnes Varda

#2. 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

#3. I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

Tom Rachman

#4. 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

#5. I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

Michael Craig-Martin

#6. 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

#7. Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

Eli Broad

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

Scott Kahn

#15. 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

#16. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.

Lucy Soutter

#17. My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.

Emma Ishta

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Contemporary art hates you.

John Waters

#22. I feel like contemporary art is everywhere now and with the rise of the internet, it's so much easier to see what artists are doing and to follow their careers.

China Chow

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#26. We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

Christo

#27. My art gives contemporary art a juvenile-delinquent phase. Its self-made style gleefully trashes conventions of beauty and society while pick-pocketing from the coolest underground styles and beliefs of the previous centuries.

Steve Olson

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

Jason Blum

#29. In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.

Mel Bochner

#30. I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

Rachel Kushner

#31. My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

David Rockefeller

#32. 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

#33. "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

#34. I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art ... that people actually paid for it.

Wade Guyton

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture.

Alexander Stoddart

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

James Henry Breasted

#43. Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

Charles Saatchi

#44. It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

Steve Martin

#45. This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society,

Ai Weiwei

#46. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Susan Sontag

#47. Underground electronic music is art - fundamentally it's based on contemporary art, culture, dance, and real music. If you look at EDM, how many of those cultural standpoints are the same?

Seth Troxler

#48. Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.

David Levithan

#49. How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?

Paul Virilio

#50. There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

James Frey

#51. You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.

Roberta Smith

#52. Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

Tom Stoppard

#53. Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

Victor Pinchuk

#54. 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

#55. I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#56. 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

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

Michael Scott

#58. There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.

Marc Jacobs

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

Damien Hirst

#60. New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas.

Sol LeWitt

#61. The problem with contemporary art is that no one bothers to do the research necessary to give people what they want.

Michael Scott

#62. 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

#63. I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house.

Bruno Tonioli

#64. 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

#65. Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.

Jerry Yang

#66. 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

#67. My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all.

Tracey Emin

#68. 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

#69. Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.

Tom Cardamone

#70. Your kids might feel more apt to try some art of their own after viewing contemporary works that are far less intimidating than those of the Old Masters.

Lynda Resnick

#71. Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.

Michelle Grabner

#72. I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

Gregory Maguire

#73. Never run upstairs when someone's chasing you. Don't try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

Mark Zero

#74. So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives."

-Jonathan Meese

Prestel Publishing

#75. When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

Kyp Malone

#76. 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

#77. Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

#78. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

Don DeLillo

#79. While 'The Endless Summer' poster was designed at the Art Center College of Design in the contemporary style of its time, the image grew out of my relationship with Rick Griffin and our deep relationship to surf images.

John Van Hamersveld

#80. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper

#81. The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

Tony Tulathimutte

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

Nicholas Serota

#83. Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.

Jeffrey Deitch

#84. I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

Vera Wang

#85. 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

#86. I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.

Jenny Lundquist

#87. I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

Mark Zero

#88. I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.

Shea Hembrey

#89. In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Fredric Jameson

#90. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

Jess Row

#91. Fortunately I don't want to be part of the mainstream. When I see a Kiki Smith work, for example, she's very contemporary, and I feel a lot of emotion in each of her pieces; I think she understands our time, and she makes really interesting art because of that.

Luis Gonzalez

#92. I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

Alison Jackson

#93. When art calls, you have to follow it. It doesn't happen often, so take the opportunity when it strikes. In all reality, what I do is art. I do create fabulous pieces of decorative baked goods.

A.M. Willard

#94. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Mark Zero

#95. The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

Maya Deren

#96. And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

Mark Zero

#97. I avoid contemporary TV ... politics ... art: all too frantic, fevered, and frivolous, or else angry, bitter.

Dean Koontz

#98. All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

David Hockney

#99. I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons.

Nikolay Semyonov

#100. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

Mark Zero