Top 100 Quotes About Modernism
#1. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#6. 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
#7. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem
#8. In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.
Robert Hughes
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer
#12. 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
#13. Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism ... and as things turned out, it was.
Mel Bochner
#14. In art we do not make things any simpler by making simpler things. Reduction does not yield certainty, but something like its opposite, which is ambiguity and multi-valence.
Kirk Varnedoe
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
John Crowe Ransom
#18. What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.
Peter Gay
#19. Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.
Bryan Appleyard
#20. 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
#21. Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.
Noam Chomsky
#22. It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original
for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did ...
Irving Sandler
#23. There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.'
Raymond Loewy
#24. It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.
James Elkins
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.
David Guterson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.
Robert Venturi
#32. Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
Roger Zelazny
#33. The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
Jackson Pollock
#34. A Harvey Nicks chick with throwaway morals and a trustfund appetite.
Saira Viola
#35. 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
#36. '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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.
Sverker Sorlin
#41. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
#43. 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
#44. Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.
Theaster Gates
#45. 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
#46. Violent overthrow of the revolution is revolutionary, and compromise with the revolution is revolutionary.
Douglas Wilson
#47. What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?
David F. Wells
#48. Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Odd Nerdrum
#49. There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism.
Pope Pius XI
#50. The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
Roger Scruton
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past
Roger Scruton
#55. Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.
Mason Cooley
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
Joseph Conrad
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.
Clement Greenberg
#65. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
Steven Pinker
#66. 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
#67. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.
Lance Olsen
#68. 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
#69. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
#70. Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.
Arthur Erickson
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change ... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.
Philip K. Dick
#76. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?
Stephen King
#77. Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#78. 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
#79. I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers.
Dave Barry
#80. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.
Stephen King
#81. What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Jonathan Lethem
#82. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Tom McDonough
#83. One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
E. M. Forster
#84. The man of the future will be young or he will not be.
Regis Debray
#85. If exposure of body is modernism, then animals are more modern than humans.
Zakir Naik
#86. 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
#87. Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
#88. Modernity is a busy place, spinning with silicon speed that goes ever faster but never forward, people pressed into cities full of loneliness.
Douglas Wilson
#89. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.
Robert Hewison
#92. 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
#93. Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
Ai Weiwei
#94. I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked
W.B.Yeats
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. And that's how we lost our ways, because more than modernism we like to love its distorted appearance.
M.H. Rakib
#99. The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
Roger Scruton
