Jerry Saltz Quotes

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

New arts destroy the old.

Todayart is moving in a direction of which our fathers would never even have dreamed.We stand before the new pictures as in a dream and we hear the apocalyptic horsemen in the air.

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

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

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

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

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.

Our art, in a sense, is quite revolutionary.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Every work of art changes its predecessors.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.