Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. — Eli Broad
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. — Jackson Pollock
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. — Kary Mullis
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. — Octavio Paz
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. — Piet Mondrian
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. — Sol LeWitt
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. — Henry Geldzahler
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
abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. — Piet Mondrian
True art awakens the
Extraordinary
Ovation — Hafez
Art and music are the vehicle for the zeitgeist. — Hozier
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. — Edith Wharton
One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space? — Anish Kapoor
My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society. — Herbert Bayer
Short Contemporary Art Quotes
Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion. — Odd Nerdrum
Art should be created for life, not for the museum — Jean Nouvel
The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art. — Thom Mayne
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. — Egon Schiele
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. — Paul Klee
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. — Theodor Adorno
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. — Jan Tschichold
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
What An Art Quotes
I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art. — Romero Britto
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art. — Sally Mann
That is what art is at the end of the day: It's an escapism that we all crave. — Lauren Jauregui
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world. — Rick Rubin
Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist. — Austin Osman Spare
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. — Donald Knuth
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight. — Emanuel Lasker
Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive...
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. — Roger Ballen
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle
It's not about how you are when things go well, what defines you is how you are when you fail from an obstacle. — Georges St-Pierre
Definition Of Art Quotes
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa. — Dave Barry
The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive. — Vladimir Lenin
The heart of our karate is real fighting.There can be no proof without real fighting. Without proof there is no trust. Without trust there is no respect. This is a definition in the world of martial arts. — Mas Oyama
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class. — Louis Dudek
The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer have it your way. — Ray Kroc
Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated. — Paul Rand
It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression. — Agnes Martin
You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition. — Marcel Duchamp
Art is definitely a passion of mine, but one that I couldn’t afford to keep-up post-graduation, so I turned to DJing to pay the bills. — Hannah Bronfman
The meeting of science and art is definitely interesting for the 21st century, and I think to use scientific expertise and knowledge to preserve an artistic statement is very interesting. It takes things a step further. — Marc Quinn
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
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
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
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
Avant Garde Art Quotes
If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age — Karel Appel
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
Contemporary Music Quotes
Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics. — Michael Eric Dyson
The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise. — Kenny G
Do I think all contemporary Christian music is good? No. — Amy Grant
Writing songs is about trying to connect with people on a deeper spiritual level - but I'm not a fan of contemporary Christian music. — Ryan Tedder
I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum. — Wynton Marsalis
I am a classical music lover - not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff. — Eberhard Weber
All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it. — Steve Reich
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice — Greil Marcus
I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art. — Damien Hirst
I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. — Trevor Nunn
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
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
I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division. — Michael Craig-Martin
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
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
Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts. — O. Henry
Contemporary Literature Quotes
Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change. — Lafcadio Hearn
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. — George Bernard Shaw
The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor. — Tony Hoagland
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it. — Gertrude Stein
Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live. — Mario Vargas Llosa
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into. — Jonathan Frakes
Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger. — Michael N. Castle
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. — Arthur Conan Doyle
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary. — Toni Morrison
If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time? — Melvin Glover
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
There is no new wave, only the sea. — Claude Chabrol
I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art. — Takashi Murakami
In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. — Fredric Jameson
Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art? — Brassai
Our world has changed for better or for worse. It is for us to find truth and beauty for today, constantly re-applying the truth of God's word to our own time and our contemporary situation. — Hans Rookmaaker
The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece. — Hiroshi Sugimoto
My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all. — Tracey Emin
Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture. — Alexander Stoddart
Apparently, a cleaner at Tate Britain... threw out a bag of rubbish, accidentally we are told, that was part of an exhibition supposedly emphasizing 'the finite existence of art'... The cleaner evidently had no time to question the relationship of his or her being to the rubbish bag, and reached the right conclusion. — Semir Zeki
By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile. — James Henry Breasted
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
There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis. — Hans Haacke
By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile. — James H. Breasted
I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons. — Nikolay Semyonov
The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests. — Scott Kahn
I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects. — Arman
The problem with contemporary art is that no one bothers to do the research necessary to give people what they want. — Michael Scott
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. — Asger Jorn
I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air. — Josef Albers
All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. — Jerry Saltz
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author. — Anish Kapoor
Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. — Donald Judd
Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society. — Victor Pinchuk
This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society. — Ai Weiwei
I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters. — Sylvester Stallone
Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in. — Jackson Pollock
I don't listen to the contemporary pop artists. They all sound alike, anyway. — Patti LuPone
All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. I don't look for skill in art... skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency... I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks. — Jerry Saltz
They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought. — David Rockefeller
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting. — Edward Hopper
The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order. — Robert Motherwell
In Conclusion
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