Quotes About Modernism

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...

I don't use old music.

Cansei de ser moderno. quero ser eterno.

The appeal of modern art remained a mystery to him.

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS…

Our shouting is louder than our actions, Our swords are taller than us, This is our tragedy. In short We wear the cape of civilisation But our souls live in the stone age

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

It is a reading age, a preaching age, a working age, but it is not a praying age.

the modern world abounds with heralds of a better future and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was silly like us or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress--and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.

Wasn't modernism's greatest coup to destroy the notion of progression? And yet it still comes back in history books, in dialectical materialism, in the New Age's recycled Confucianism--the hope that all of us are travelling through concentric rings of knowledge towards some greater truth. And beneath that hope, the biggest lie: that things are getting better. Portentousness is only retrospective.

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere - the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.

Çepeçevre, binalar?n füme camdan cepheleri insan yüzlerine benziyorlar. DonuklaÅŸm?? yüzler bunlar. Sanki içeride hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi, sanki yüzlerin gerisinde hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi. Gerçekten de kimse yok. Ä°ÅŸte, ideal kent dedjÄŸin böyle olur.

My work as a painter has always been tied to Modernism. I read everything I could find related to art, from Paul Cézanne through the 1950s.

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

The chief modern rival of Christianity is 'liberalism'... at every point, the two movements are in direct opposition.

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'

The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these 'styles'. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers' outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were 'modernity' and 'functionalism'.

But there were also men of far greater value who were drawn to Cubism, men whose language was paint or sculpture: among them Léger, Picabia, Delaunay, La Fresnaye, Le Fauconnier, Dufy for a while and Friesz, Lhote, Kisling, Herbin of the Bateau-Lavoir, Survage, Marcoussis, Diego Rivera, Mondrian, Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and perhaps the most important of them all, the three brothers Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp.