True art awakens the
Extraordinary
Ovation — Hafez
Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify. — Francis Picabia
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. — Kary Mullis
abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. — Piet Mondrian
...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order. — Pablo Picasso
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. — Octavio Paz
Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. — Eli Broad
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first. — Clement Greenberg
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
Art revolves around creating something that isn't there. — Kathleen Hanna
Art and music are the vehicle for the zeitgeist. — Hozier
Great art picks up where nature ends. — Marc Chagall
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. — Paul Klee
We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes. — Alexander Rodchenko
The room is there for the human being - not the human being for the room. — El Lissitzky
I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things. — Andy Partridge
Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape. — Gyorgy Ligeti
If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age — Karel Appel
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. And I think it's healthy to return to classical forms. — Michael Haneke
An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. — Eugene Ionesco
The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. — Clement Greenberg
Avant-garde means never having to say you're sorry. — Marc Ribot
Neckties satisfy modern man's desire to dress in art. — Harry Anderson
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams. — Albert Einstein
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
It was not very easy for a woman to impose herself as a modern artist in Germany… Most of our male colleagues continued for a long time to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status. — Hannah Hoch
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
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Abstract Art Quotes
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock
The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. — William Kentridge
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. — Pablo Picasso
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. — Alexander Calder
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. — Jan Tschichold
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. — Kenneth Tynan
Contemporary Art Quotes
If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time? — Melvin Glover
My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society. — Herbert Bayer
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
Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward. — Ben Eine
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
A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with. — Banksy
I especially like to collect contemporary art. — Yusaku Maezawa
I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation. — Yusaku Maezawa
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
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. — Sol LeWitt
Visual Art Quotes
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary. — Barbara Kruger
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan
Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life. — Steven Spielberg
In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. — Walt Disney
I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson
The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan
Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as far a reach as you can, then go all the way! — Kay WalkingStick
Conceptual Art Quotes
After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. — David Sedaris
John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. — Jerry Saltz
I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something. — Kim Gordon
Anything can be art. Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between objects. — Joseph Kosuth
Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit. — Alex Grey
Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’ — Lucy R. Lippard
I've come to understand that life is best lived, not conceptualized. — Bruce Lee
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. — Sol LeWitt
I have come to understand that life is best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. — Bruce Lee
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work — Sol LeWitt
Pop Art Quotes
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. — Jeffrey Deitch
Fashion wasn't what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going. — Andy Warhol
When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them. — Andy Warhol
The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all. — Andy Warhol
Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable. — Leonard Baskin
Pop art is
the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naive! — Robert Indiana
Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won't be American; it will be universal. — Roy Lichtenstein
Don't worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that's creativity. — Peter Max
People should fall in love with their eyes closed. — Andy Warhol
The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting — Andy Warhol
Abstract Expressionism Quotes
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don Delillo
Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! — LeRoy Neiman
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. — Jackson Pollock
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. — Robert Rauschenberg
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. — Jackson Pollock
When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
Abstract Painting Quotes
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. — Jenny Saville
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. — Frank Stella
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. — Theo van Doesburg
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem de Kooning
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. — Jean-Michel Basquiat
What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. — Marc Chagall
As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye. — Clement Greenberg
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. — Henri Matisse
High Art Quotes
I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus
You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity. — Banksy
There's a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It's the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college. — Jill Scott
Vision may be a high-enough throughput input to the brain that is also sufficiently connected to its reward modules that AI-assisted generative art may converge to wire-heading. Probably nothing. — Andrej Karpathy
Atlantis was a highly evolved civilization where the sciences and arts were far more advanced than one might guess. Atlantis was technologically advanced in genetic engineering, computer science, inter-dimensional physics, and artistically developed with electronic music and crystal art forms. — Frederick Lenz
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time. — Harold Pinter
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar. — Gus Van Sant
I don’t create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art. — Chase Jarvis
Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts. — O. Henry
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well. — Albert Einstein
My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde; the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design. — Zaha Hadid
I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done. — Jeff Koons
You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. — Michael Scott
Avant-garde is French for bullshit — John Lennon
Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values. — Jamake Highwater
I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself. — Arnold Newman
I think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully. — David Starkey
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants. — Robert Hughes
I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level. — Steven Soderbergh
In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. — Yayoi Kusama
There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art? — W. H. Auden
Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde. — Stefan Themerson
Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters. — Arthur C. Clarke
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. — Robert Morgan
Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world. — Tommy McCarthy
I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance? — Nicolas Cage
Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it. — Mason Cooley
In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best? — C. D. Innes
Avant garde" has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. — C. D. Innes
The cumulative effect of the Romantic theory of creativity, as played out in the context of belief in the virtue of the avant-garde, is that while the art world has effectively freed itself from the tyranny of artistic tradition and its historic patronage system, it has ended up inhabiting an autonomous but perceived irrelevance. — John Walford
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world. — Dan Graham
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design. — Michael Foley
Avant-garde architects have never been able to depend on the support of the establishment, since the customary patrons of this most conservative and slowly moving art form have historically been resistant to innovation and experiment. — Martin Filler
In Conclusion
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