Modernism Quotes - Page 3

• When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

  Eric Hoffer

  Modernity, Industry

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Travel, Eye

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• The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  People, Age, Realizing

  Rabindranath Tagore (2016). “The Cycle of Spring”, p.16, Sai ePublications

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• No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important.

  Mark Kostabi

  Art, Strong, Intelligent

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• I am not the avant-garde. I am the artist who comes after the advancing guard. I am more concerned with continuity of ideas and tradition than in inventing a unique imagery.

  Nathan Oliveira

  Artist, Unique, Ideas

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• Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

  Leonard Baskin

  Art, Pops, Raised

  1965 In Publisher's Weekly, 5 Apr. See Wilde 909:22.

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• It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original - for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did.

  Irving Sandler

  Eras, Impossible, Pollock

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• I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Art, Men, Ostriches

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2004). “D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles”, p.228, Cambridge University Press

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• The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

  Umberto Eco

  Love, Attitude, Past

  Umberto Eco (1984). “Postscript to The name of the rose”, Harcourt

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• It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

  Oscar Wilde

  Fashion, Clothes, Modern

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.816, GENERAL PRESS

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• Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

  Lewis Carroll

  Running, Somewhere Else, Wonderland

  Through the Looking-Glass ch. 2 (1872)

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• I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

  Italo Calvino

  May, Assuming, Form

  Italo Calvino (2010). “Invisible Cities”, p.123, Random House

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• Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.

  Robert Venturi

  Communication, Space, Should

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• Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Color, Drawing, Form

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• Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Art, Kitsch, Talent

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• Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

  Robert Hughes

  Imagination, Protein

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• Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

  Ellen Lupton

  Discipline, Design, Community

  Ellen Lupton (2014). “Thinking with Type”, p.174, Chronicle Books

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• Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins.

  Clement Greenberg

  Sacrifice, Rooms, Logic

  Clement Greenberg, Robert C. Morgan (2007). “Clement Greenberg, Late Writings”, Univ Of Minnesota Press

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• I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

  Angela Carter

  Fun, Book, Mean

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• One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

  Larry Wall

  Power, Ideas, People

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• what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

  Jonathan Lethem

  Exactly Is, Anxiety, Postmodernism

  Jonathan Lethem (2012). “The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc.”, p.98, Random House

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• If exposure of body is modernism, then animals are more modern than humans.

  Zakir Naik

  Funny, Humorous, Islamic

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• Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

  Gilbert Adair

  Past, Principles, Batteries

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• The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.

  Andrew Graham-Dixon

  World, Neurosis, Painting

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• A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

  Italo Svevo

  Pillars, Novelists, Proust

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