Contemporary Art Quotes - Page 2

• I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

  Sylvester Stallone

  Art, Want, Buying

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• Apparently, a cleaner at Tate Britain... threw out a bag of rubbish, accidentally we are told, that was part of an exhibition supposedly emphasizing 'the finite existence of art'... The cleaner evidently had no time to question the relationship of his or her being to the rubbish bag, and reached the right conclusion.

  Semir Zeki

  Art, Bags, Exhibitions

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• In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand.

  R. O. Blechman

  Art, Loss, Hands

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• I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons.

  Nikolay Semyonov

  Art, Icons, Doubt

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• The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

  Scott Kahn

  Art, Moving, Today

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• There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.

  Hans Haacke

  Art, Sick, Exhibitions

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• I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects.

  Arman

  Art, Our World, Long

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• By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

  James Henry Breasted

  Art, Civilization, Egypt

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• I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

  Josef Albers

  Art, Air, Order

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• Populism in contemporary art can become a dirty word. There is this notion that to not be understood is a reflection of depth. I'm sure this is true in some cases, but on the whole I can't accept this as a vision of art. There's something so cynical about assuming your audience is unintelligent or that artists shouldn't care about their viewers.

  Dario Robleto

  Art, Dirty, Reflection

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

  David Edelstein

  Art, Years, Renaissance

  Source: www.vulture.com

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• I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house.

  Bruno Tonioli

  Art, Sharks, House

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• Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art.

  John Walford

  Art, Sides, Failing

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• Contemporary art hates you.

  John Waters

  Art, Hate, Contemporary

  "And Your Family Too". Installation shot, Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, www.interviewmagazine.com. 2009.

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• I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Art, People, Division

  Source: briansherwin-artcritic.blogspot.com

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• The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Dream, Sweet, Art

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• The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

  Agnes Varda

  Art, Film Critics, Cinema

  Interview with Liza Bear, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 22, 2009.

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• My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society.

  Herbert Bayer

  Artist, Integration, Contemporary

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• Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward.

  Ben Eine

  Ideas, People, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Meeting and talking to the artist adds a special element to collecting contemporary art that makes the work an irreplaceable treasure rather than just another possession.

  Ernest West Basden

  Art, Talking, Special

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• ...it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public...should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

  Leo Steinberg

  Art, Mirrors, True Life

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• It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating.

  Kalup Linzy

  Art, Moving, Museums

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.

  Takashi Murakami

  Art, Kids, Thinking

  Interview with Alison Gingeras, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 15, 2010.

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• I have a passion for modern and contemporary art.

  Delphine Arnault

  Art, Passion, Modern

  Source: wwd.com

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• I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

  Jason Blum

  Art, People, Found

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