Quotes About Modernism

The problem of postmodernism and film thus smuggles in with it the problem of modernism in film, or, in other words, the dialectic of modernism and mass culture, in which cinematic entertainments are usually regarded as a low cultural form.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Modernism and Fundamentalism are popular—they are two quick and easy answers to a complex question.

What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an idol.

Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations—cut-rate gas stations—and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.

You're a function of an impersonal cultural totality.

Apple actively encourages the population to lose their possessions. Music? Store it on the Cloud. Books? Store them on the Cloud. Film, magazines, newspapers, TV are all safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It's a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.

As Dickinson's Misery suggests in a number of ways, when lyric becomes an adjective, it evokes a theory of personal expression and abstraction that was highly problematic for Dickinson, but that has come to be highly valued in retrospect by modernism.

Postmodernizam obra?a pažnju na modernizam. U osnovi su modernizmi binarne reakcije, a postmodernizam polinarna reakcija.

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

Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.

I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.

The whole Modernist lie is that art is about the artist.

I want to be a machine.

you get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures...

1] God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels. 2] But we moderns are impatient and destructive 3] And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious. 4] In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

Besides he was out of sympathy with the modern Sorbonne, where ideas of scientific exactitude, after the German model, were beginning to prevail over humanism.