Quotes About Modernism

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life.

at the heart of permaculture lay a gorgeously empathetic view of human nature: people aren't inherently wasteful and greedy, but fall into those patterns because of the temptations of the modern world.

In place of the dream, the future will put art on a scientific and technical basis.

From today, painting is dead.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq

I find it hard to harness respect for those who genuinely believe that postmodernity, whatever it may be, allows us to claim no roots.

This uncertainty in turn, of course, begets a new and anxious eagerness for certainty: hence the appeal of fundamentalism, which in today's world is not so much a return to a premodern worldview but precisely to one form of modernism (reading the Bible within the grid of a quasi-or pseudoscientific quest for "objective truth

That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.

The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of twentieth-century America.

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind.

Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world's future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

No hay tontería en que el hombre moderno no sea capaz de creer, siempre que eluda creer en Cristo

Modernism ingeniously finds a way not to present its theology directly, but rather through profane notions that imply it. It avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights which assume he is divine.

Idéologie de l'homme moderne: acheter le plus d'objets possibles; réaliser le plus de voyages possibles; copuler le plus grand nombre de fois possible.

Al despojarse de la túnica cristiana y de la toga clásica, no queda del europeo sino un bárbaro pálido

Primitive man transforms objects into subjects; modern man transforms subjects into objects. We can suppose that the former deceives himself, but we know with certainty that the latter is wrong.

Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road "change." The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense. The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man.

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