Artistic Revolution Quotes

The best art is either political or revolutionary....Those things that are powerfully revolutionary are not always successful in the market place.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

I think we're at a really critical time in terms of art, and I think it's totally possible to have a project that is entertaining but also moving the cultural needle forward. I think it's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to work on 'Billions.'

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.

I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.

Speech is my hammer bang the world into shape now let it fall - HUNGH

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

My role as an artist is not to make changes [in society] but to inspire changes.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

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

Warhol had resonance because it was high art and low art. And you could argue about it endlessly.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.

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.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

Amadeus Mozart is to music something like Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was to literature. They are people who created something that nobody before them had. Absolute geniuses. You can recognize their harmonies among thousands.

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

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.

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.