Modernism Quotes

• The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

  Albert Camus

  Feet, Intelligence, Mind

  Albert Camus (1963). “Carnets: 1942-1951”

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• Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

  Arthur Erickson

  Artist, Gone, Constraints

  Arthur Erickson's Speech to McGill University School of Architecture, www.arthurerickson.com. October 21, 2000.

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• Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

  Bryan Appleyard

  World, May, Absence

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• Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

  Paul de Man

  Desire, Wipe, Departure

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• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

  Salvador Dali

  Modern, Bother, One Thing

  "Diary of a Genius" by Salvador Dali, Creation Books, (p. 42), 1998.

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• What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Mean, Way

  Louise Bourgeois, Donald Burton Kuspit (1988). “Bourgeois”, Vintage

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• Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Attention, Realistic

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1995). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969”, p.86, University of Chicago Press

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• I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

  Alexander Herzen

  Passion, Men, Feelings

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• Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Silly, Postmodernism

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• Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

  Ai Weiwei

  Democracy, Soil, Wealth

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• In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

  Herbert Read

  Art, Desire, Inspired

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• War is the highest form of modern art.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Art, War, Modern

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• In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Doe, Facts

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• 

  The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Cities, Police

  1946 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.

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• One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

  Wallace Stevens

  Time, Important, Modern

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.255, Vintage

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• In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

  Guy Debord

  Modern, Accumulation, Representation

  Guy Debord (2012). “Society Of The Spectacle”, p.30, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• You are born modern, you do not become so.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Modern, Born, Postmodernism

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

  William Shakespeare

  Eye, Tongue, Wonder

  Sonnet 106

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• Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

  Robert Hewison

  Taken, Optimism, Postmodern

  Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

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• It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.

  Lewis Carroll

  Running, Philosophical, Wonderland

  Lewis Carroll (1976). “Alice Through the Looking Glass: Musical”, p.13, Dramatic Publishing

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• For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Years, Leaving

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

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• Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving... in the contemporary world, we have come to expect instant response and immediate understanding.

  Nicholas Serota

  Art, Sight, Understanding

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• The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

  Mason Cooley

  Despair, Found

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• When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Appreciation, Art, Long

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• Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

  Theaster Gates

  Ethics

  "Theaster Gates’ Monastic Orders". Interview with Ann Binlot, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 22, 2014.

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