Charlton Heston Quotes

I hate artists who are not of their time.

I didn't have any interest in traditional art.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.

In my opinion, the most dangerous thing an artist can do in this day and age is not embrace the present.

Art has to be able to match life, to respond to the ever-changing forms of the world, to electrify the audience.

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

You can make serious pop, you know? There was a time when the best movies were the most popular, and I keep thinking that can happen again.

The bigger artists are definitely looking and paying attention to the culture and the style of bounce music.

Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

My work participates in that really quick and easy and inexpensive material that's part of our culture. In that way, my work engages the means of production that we live with, even while it's classical and embodies some things from a very long time ago.