Top 100 Quotes About Modern Art
#1. The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Barnett Newman
#2. 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
#3. Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn't.
Craig Damrauer
#4. The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.
Robert Irwin
#5. 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
#6. The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.
Jackson Pollock
#7. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
#8. High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
Diane Wakoski
#9. 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
#10. If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.
Herbert Read
#11. 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
#12. What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
Louise Bourgeois
#13. 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.
Tom Wolfe
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
#18. Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#19. A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.
Nelson Shanks
#21. Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things.
Aldous Huxley
#22. Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton
#23. Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.
Dave Barry
#24. When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.
Douglas Wilson
#25. When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.
Richard Phillips
#26. 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
#27. The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.
Robert Motherwell
#28. As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art.
Paul McCartney
#29. What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions.
Meredith Duran
#30. I think it's ugly, but I don't know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.
Kurt Vonnegut
#31. 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
#32. This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
Salvador Dali
#33. You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion.
Peter Saul
#34. 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
#35. Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.
Max Bill
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.
Hans Rookmaaker
#42. The Europeans who went to Africa came back with modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?
Duke Ellington
#43. The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
Tom Wolfe
#44. 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
#45. If you think of modern art like sex in all its forms - heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, multipartnered, bestial, whatever, with absolutely no holds barred and with everything available and permissible - that would be modern art.
Eve Arnold
#46. The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ...
Herbert Read
#47. Pollock said several times that he couldn't separate himself from his art. Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, I was much more his persona - his struggles as a human being - that was interesting to me.
Ed Harris
#48. 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.
David Amram
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family - five kids and 12 grandkids - so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I'm chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Schwab
#53. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Octavio Paz
#54. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.
William Eggleston
#55. In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things.
Slavoj Zizek
#56. 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
#57. To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.
Luis Gonzalez
#58. You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old.
Alexandre Dumas
#59. 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
#60. This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.
Anthony Burgess
#61. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard
#67. Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.
Henri Matisse
#68. 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
#69. In general, modern art ... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
Herbert Read
#70. While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#71. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.
J.P. Donleavy
#72. The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.
William Barrett
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.
Jerry Saltz
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. How can you say that modern art is ugly,when you worship the Lord in a building painted like this?
Hans Rookmaaker
#81. 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.
Siri Hustvedt
#82. In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.
Edward Hopper
#83. In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.
Andre Malraux
#84. A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
Robert Henri
#85. Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
Barbara Kruger
#86. You'll pay for making Genos look like modern art! Lead the way!
ONE
#87. Christianity was beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness ... modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them ...
G.K. Chesterton
#88. 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
#90. All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.
Joyce Cary
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
Charles Baudelaire
#94. Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.
Amit Chaudhuri
#98. I grew up on a farm with only two TV channels. I didn't grow up around much culture. When I got excited about painting, I never really got further than what would have been in a modern art history textbook.
Neil Farber
#99. I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.
Michael Tippett
#100. The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.
Thom Mayne
