Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

Clem had made it known that Pollock was a great painter.

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.

Anne Imhof is a powerful artist from Germany making work that is totally interdisciplinary.

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Basquiat will continue to show us new things about who we are and why he was so important.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there's an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.