Pauline Kael Quotes

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

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.

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

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

All art is based on non-conformity.

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.

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.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation.