Artistic Movements Quotes

Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.

Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.

When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

The world will see many fashions of art and most of the world will follow the fashions and make none. These cults - these 'movements' - are absolutely necessary, or at any rate their causes are, for somewhere in their centres are the ones who bear the Idea, the ones who have questioned, 'But what do I think?' and 'How shall I say it best?

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

To mention only contemporaries, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Courbet are masters. And finally [I like] all those [painters] who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

New Wave art was the rage of the eighties. Now it's exhibited in oldies-but-goodies museums, usually in black-and-pink frames.

There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, orKnights oftheIsoscelesTriangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.

I'm not going to sit for some painting. That's so 1800s. I'm not doing that.

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.

Every now and then, a lot of bands doing the same kind of music will organically sprout up at once.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?