Contemporary Art quotes:

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Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society. -- Victor Pinchuk
What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy. -- Victor Pinchuk
I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters. -- Sylvester Stallone
By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile. -- James Henry Breasted
There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at. -- Marc Jacobs
There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis. -- Hans Haacke
We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards. -- Christo
There is no new wave, only the sea. -- Claude Chabrol
Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture. -- Alexander Stoddart
All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. -- Jerry Saltz
I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons. -- Nikolay Semyonov
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. -- Sol LeWitt
Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. -- Eli Broad
The problem with contemporary art is that no one bothers to do the research necessary to give people what they want. -- Michael Scott
You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. -- Michael Scott
Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. -- Donald Judd
I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art. -- Damien Hirst
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author. -- Anish Kapoor
The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding. -- Theaster Gates
The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests. -- Scott Kahn
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. -- Asger Jorn
I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air. -- Josef Albers
I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects. -- Arman
I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity. -- Cindy Sherman
Apparently, a cleaner at Tate Britain... threw out a bag of rubbish, accidentally we are told, that was part of an exhibition supposedly emphasizing 'the finite existence of art'... The cleaner evidently had no time to question the relationship of his or her being to the rubbish bag, and reached the right conclusion. -- Semir Zeki
Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads, and starts spreading that old gospel according to Hyperbole. No questions asked... And thus the bill of goods is sold, all along the line. An art historical snake, swallowing its own tale. -- Abe Ajay
In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand. -- R. O. Blechman
It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function. -- Steve Martin
I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house. -- Bruno Tonioli
People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference. -- Damien Hirst
I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand. -- Jason Blum
We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life. -- David Elliott
There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet. -- Dasha Zhukova
I feel like contemporary art is everywhere now and with the rise of the internet, it's so much easier to see what artists are doing and to follow their careers. -- China Chow
I've become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital - no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We've come into our own, finally. -- Eli Broad
In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science. -- Michael Leunig
If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece. -- Elizabeth Peyton
Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't. -- Charles Saatchi
I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it. -- Tom Rachman
Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good. -- David Rockefeller
My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings. -- David Rockefeller
I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open. -- Delphine Arnault
I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in. -- John Green
There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing. -- James Frey
By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. -- Peter York
I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest. -- Nouriel Roubini
Contemporary art hates you. -- John Waters
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art. -- Tom Stoppard
I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. -- Delphine Arnault
The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece. -- Hiroshi Sugimoto
This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society, -- Ai Weiwei
I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art . . . that people actually paid for it. -- Wade Guyton
All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it? -- David Hockney
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. -- Susan Sontag
Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in. -- Jackson Pollock
In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery. -- Ai Weiwei
The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order. -- Robert Motherwell
Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving... in the contemporary world, we have come to expect instant response and immediate understanding. -- Nicholas Serota
Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. -- Abigail Solomon-Godeau
I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums. -- Hans-Ulrich Obrist
My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all. -- Tracey Emin
I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division. -- Michael Craig-Martin
Meeting and talking to the artist adds a special element to collecting contemporary art that makes the work an irreplaceable treasure rather than just another possession. -- Ernest West Basden
I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school. -- Vera Wang
In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes. -- Jean Pigozzi
The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films. -- Agnes Varda
We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand. -- Massimiliano Gioni
A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is ourselves. ' -- Claude Bernard
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist. -- Leonard Baskin
Your kids might feel more apt to try some art of their own after viewing contemporary works that are far less intimidating than those of the Old Masters. -- Lynda Resnick
Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception. -- Jeffrey Deitch
In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic. -- Mel Bochner
I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art. -- Takashi Murakami
Underground electronic music is art - fundamentally it's based on contemporary art, culture, dance, and real music. If you look at EDM, how many of those cultural standpoints are the same? -- Seth Troxler
My art gives contemporary art a juvenile-delinquent phase. Its self-made style gleefully trashes conventions of beauty and society while pick-pocketing from the coolest underground styles and beliefs of the previous centuries. -- Steve Olson
It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad. -- David Edelstein
Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art. -- John Walford
Art is about asking questions and engaging a dialog. By challenging or investigating conventions contemporary art helps promote an on-going sense of discovery, contemplation, and understanding. I think these are all important things. -- Kim Anderson

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