Quotes About Modernism

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!

Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we've got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead." "He's not dead; just very tired.

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

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

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

The day of individual happiness has passed.

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

For decades the human dimension has been an overlooked and haphazardly addressed urban planning topic, while many other issues, such as accomodating the rocketing rise in car traffic, have come more strongly into focus. In addition, dominant planning ideologies — modernism in particular — have specifically put a low priority on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers.

It has been almost 50 years since American journalist and author Jane Jacobs published her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.1 She pointed out how the dramatic increase in car traffic and the urban planning ideology of modernism that separates the uses of the city and emphasizes free-standing individual buildings would put an end to urban space and city life and result in lifeless cities devoid of people.

I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled "Dante and the Bowery," arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

I knew the term Stepford Wife, and I knew what that meant. I never read the book, and I think before I started filming I watched the movie. I thought it was very dated.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

I never did calligraphy... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism... It's part of that asceticism.

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Lowndes was a colleague, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot.

We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.