Quotes on Modern Art

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. 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.