Top 100 Quotes About Modernism
#1. Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.
Ellen Lupton
#2. We have survived the "Death of God" and the "Death of Man". We will surely survive "the Death of History" ... and the death of post-modernism.
Norman Davies
#3. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly in the know.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. The problem with modernism is that we actually believe, naively and arrogantly, that we can in some way hold any concept and grasp it - and if we cannot, they it is absurd and impossible and therefore nonexistent.
Tobin Wilson
#5. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
Will Self
#6. Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#7. Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism ... and as things turned out, it was.
Mel Bochner
#8. I like Modernism. I grew up around these sort of eclectic, heavily carved, baroque, rococo, highly ornamented styles that were in my life from the time that I was a child until now in my business life. So I like clean, straight, minimalist lines.
Paul Brown
#9. If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
Leon Krier
#10. The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
John Crowe Ransom
#11. What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.
Peter Gay
#12. Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.
Bryan Appleyard
#13. A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.
Elias Canetti
#14. There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.'
Raymond Loewy
#15. Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."
Philip Pullman
#16. I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.
Liam Gillick
#17. Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.
David Guterson
#18. A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
#19. Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins ...
Clement Greenberg
#20. Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.
Robert Venturi
#21. I think as someone who collects beautiful things from the past, the thing that I miss the most about modernism and the things I lament about the past are everyday things that you would use were made more beautifully.
Dita Von Teese
#22. 'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.
John Tavener
#23. There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.
Twyla Tharp
#24. Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.
Eva Zeisel
#25. Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.
Larry Wall
#26. Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.
Theaster Gates
#27. From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.
Martin Filler
#28. Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Odd Nerdrum
#29. There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism.
Pope Pius XI
#30. The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
Roger Scruton
#31. You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.
Ben Van Berkel
#32. Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
#33. Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
Roger Scruton
#35. Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.
Mason Cooley
#36. I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.
Billy Corgan
#37. In India there's no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man's face and you'll find an old man's mind.
Meghna Pant
#38. Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.
Eric Kandel
#39. Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history.
Joseph Kerman
#40. Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Roger Ebert
#41. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#42. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.
Clement Greenberg
#43. Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.
James K.A. Smith
#44. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.
Lance Olsen
#45. For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#46. Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.
Arthur Erickson
#48. The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
James Fenton
#49. People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.
Campbell McGrath
#50. Cruise through the gargantuan sites - YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! - and it's as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web's aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.
Virginia Heffernan
#51. What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Jonathan Lethem
#52. If exposure of body is modernism, then animals are more modern than humans.
Zakir Naik
#53. Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.
Leslie Fiedler
#54. Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.
Robert Hewison
#56. There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.
John Currin
#57. Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
Ai Weiwei
#58. The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
Vivian Gornick
#59. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#60. I never did calligraphy ... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism ... It's part of that asceticism.
Paul Rand
#61. And that's how we lost our ways, because more than modernism we like to love its distorted appearance.
M.H. Rakib
#62. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
Roger Scruton
#63. The role of the architect as artist is an ancient one, but it was de-emphasized with the rise of modernism, which rejected the drawing-based Beaux-Arts tradition in favor of a more technocratic approach.
Martin Filler
#64. When God-given, heaven-sent revival does come, it will undo in weeks the damage that blasphemous Modernism has taken years to build.
Leonard Ravenhill
#65. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Italo Svevo
#66. Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
David G. Hartwell
#67. Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.
Phillip E. Johnson
#68. Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment.
Paul Kurtz
#70. The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned.
Mason Cooley
#71. Because of the need to remove all modernism, we stayed in the middle of nowhere all day long, living out of tents. It was cold. It definitely set the scene.
Skeet Ulrich
#72. I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.
Will Self
#73. Pope Benedict is an amazingly visionary person. What he has done is establish an evolutionary process that will help undo the Reformation. The Anglican Church has been hijacked by modernism, with synods trying to amend the faith and this process will allow traditional Anglicans to be themselves.
Peter Slipper
#74. Modernism has been consumed and remains partially digested in the belly of capital, awaiting occasional bouts of flatulence.
Nick Dunn
#75. Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.
Miguel Syjuco
#76. I remain interested in the potential of art, except I've always been more struck by applied modernism than high modernism. It's partly because of feminist theory and being brought up in the '70s, with questioning who is speaking, and why, and what authority they're carrying.
Liam Gillick
#77. I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it ... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.
Paul Rand
#78. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.
Rabindranath Tagore
#79. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.
Peter Watson
#81. Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
Harold Rosenberg
#82. In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'
Brad Holland
#83. Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on.
Jane Goldman
#84. My definition of modernism took a while to develop.
Peter Gay
#85. Modernism probably wouldn't have happened without lesbians in Paris.
Diana Souhami
#86. The property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmod ernism it is visibility.10
Chris Hedges
#87. Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.
Tadao Ando
#88. One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
Larry Wall
#89. Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?
John Leonard
#90. Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.
Tom Turner
#91. Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.
Arthur Erickson
#92. The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with ... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.
Will Self
#93. Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.
Martin Filler
#94. Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here.
Magnus Flyte
#95. Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
John Berger
#96. As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Will Self
#97. Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.
John Walford
#98. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
#99. There was good in seahorses, in yellow dwarfs of destiny, but they are in no way adapted to the requirements of modern life.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Tom McDonough
#100. Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
F Scott Fitzgerald
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