Top 76 What Is Modern Art Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.
Thom Mayne
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music.
Neville Weston
#7. 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
#8. You'll pay for making Genos look like modern art! Lead the way!
ONE
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
Robert Henri
#12. 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
#13. Fifty grand for a paper bucket? Well it was all about context, you see.
Paul Christensen
#14. With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez.
Joaquin Sorolla
#15. The movement of abstract art ... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.
Meyer Schapiro
#16. In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.
Edward Hopper
#17. 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
#18. I love going to art galleries. The Tate Modern is one of my favourite things to do. But I don't invest in the history of it and I don't read up on it. I am a guy who would buy a print rather than buy an original.
James McAvoy
#19. How can you say that modern art is ugly,when you worship the Lord in a building painted like this?
Hans Rookmaaker
#20. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. 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
#22. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
#23. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce
render emotional
his audience, each time.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.
Benjamin Disraeli
#28. I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born.
Eric Kandel
#29. Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The Europeans who went to Africa came back with modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?
Duke Ellington
#33. 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
#34. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#35. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Octavio Paz
#36. 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
#37. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Golda Meir
#38. Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
G.K. Chesterton
#39. I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, 'My kid could do this,' and 'We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah.' And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.
John Baldessari
#40. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
#41. A picture is a work of art, not because it is 'modern,' nor because it is 'ancient,' but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.
John F. Carlson
#42. In general, modern art ... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
Herbert Read
#43. 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
#44. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#45. Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.
Henri Matisse
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#51. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#52. Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.
Antony Gormley
#53. Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.
Sebastian Junger
#54. 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
#55. The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Barnett Newman
#56. The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood.
Elizabeth Holmes
#57. 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
#58. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#59. I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#60. In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.
Ellen Dissanayake
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Diana Vreeland
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed.
Alexander Rodchenko
#68. There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.
Malik Bendjelloul
#69. 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.
Rafael Moneo
#70. Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art.
Mike Curran
#71. 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
#72. A sport, a struggle for results and a fight for prizes. I think that the discussion about "chess is science or chess is art" is already inappropriate. The purpose of modern chess is to reach a result.
Alexander Morozevich
#73. The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.
Andrew Hoberek
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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.
