Quotes & Sayings About Contemporary Art

It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating. — Kalup Linzy

The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

The problem with contemporary art is that no one bothers to do the research necessary to give people what they want. — Michael Scott

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

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

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible. — Liam Gillick

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it? — David Hockney

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

They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought. — David Rockefeller

... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold. — Mark Zero

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument. — Mark Zero

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

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low. — Jerry Saltz

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art. — Tom Stoppard

I think you can be contemporary without taking your clothes off. — Robert Helpmann

Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker. — Fiston Mwanza Mujila

The issue is Kinkade's ideology, and particularly his nostalgia; his paintings endlessly trumpet a nonexistent past when times were simpler and morality more pure. There's nothing wrong with this, but it stands at odds with a contemporary art world that looks to the future for inspiration. We value complexity and innovation, and distrust saccharine pictures of the past. — Paddy Johnson

Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of. — Jerry Yang

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art. — Odd Nerdrum

I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house. — Bruno Tonioli

A blank canvas...has unlimited possibilities. — Stephanie Perkins

I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons. — Nikolay Semyonov

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile. — Michael Tilson Thomas

While photographs certainly attest to Nazi crimes, the magnitude of Nazi genocide demands that every trace of the regime be forever remembered. The various symbols devised by the Nazi image-makers for the most sophisticated visual identity of any nation are a vivid reminder of the systematic torture and murder engaged in by this totalitarian state. These pictures, signs, and emblems are not merely clip art for contemporary designers to toy with as they please, but evidence of crimes against humanity. — Steven Heller

I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers. — Gregory Maguire

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting. — Mark Zero

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

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn't quite happen. I guess I'm someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see. — Donald Fagen

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone. — Roberta Smith

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

Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting. — Tom Cardamone

All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. I don't look for skill in art ... Skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency ... I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks. — Jerry Saltz

Looking into the mirror I ask myself:
"You live in a house equipped with air conditioning.
You eat tasty food.
You utilize convenient transportation to travel.
You utilize convenient information technology to live.
Could you not say that you, who do all this, are not a dictator?
Isn't it right that you life is supported by somebody else's death?
Doesn't your life that exists at the expense of somebody else's sacrifice infinitely resemble the life of a dictator who only cares about his own life?"
-Yasumasa Morimura (excerpt from "Mr. Morimura's Dictator Speech"). — Marinella Venanzi

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

Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots. — Sally Jo Martine

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'. — Geoff Dyer

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada's historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a "National Gallery of Canada" might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as "bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art" rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? — Lynda Jessup

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives."

-Jonathan Meese — Prestel Publishing

A creative period in art is
determined by the order of a particular style applied to the disorder of a particular time. It gives form and
formulas to contemporary passions. — Albert Camus

I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Many cherish art as a special haven within an over-schematized world, where ambiguities can thrive. If an artwork's message is self-evident, maybe it's just an illustration, a decorative non-entity, a well-executed craft object, hardly counting as 'significant' art at all. It's not just that without an explanation the viewer is lost; without some written framework to steady it, the art itself risks losing its way, never gaining traction in the contemporary art system. From this perspective, both viewer and artwork alike are as if handicapped without the art-world's special assistance. — Gilda Williams

Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. — Eli Broad

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand. — Jason Blum

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism. — Arne Glimcher

Contemporary art hates you. — John Waters

You are on my side," she says.
"What side is that?" I ask.
"The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists."
"Who are we playing?"
"The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them. — Jenny Hubbard

"Contemporary art" for me is a kind of historical term that describes the 40 years between the Berlin Wall going up and then coming down. I'm not sure who will come up with a better term to describe art, but I think contemporary art is actually done for. — Liam Gillick

Contemporary art and manga - what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators. — Takashi Murakami

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

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

It's no longer terribly sexy to own shares in certain companies; it used to be that being a shareholder in a corporation would connect you with it. The result is that people really want to invest in valuable things, and contemporary art has become a very stable material value with great growth potential. — Thomas Koerfer

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

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. — Susan Sontag

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls. — Maya Deren

There's no better way to get to know a person than through their art. — Tessa Emily Hall

Our world has changed for better or for worse. It is for us to find truth and beauty for today, constantly re-applying the truth of God's word to our own time and our contemporary situation. — Hans Rookmaaker

One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sane standing in front of you and politely engaging with you. People react. — Tino Sehgal

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

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977]. — A.S. Byatt

A text makes the word more specific. It really kind of defines it within the context in which it is being used. If it is just taken out of a context and presented as a sort of object, which is what - you know, which is a contemporary art idea, you know. It is like an old surrealist idea or an old cubist idea to take something out of context and put it in a completely different context. And it sort of gives it a different meaning and creates another world, another kind of world in which we enter. — Robert Barry

Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access. — Lucy Soutter

In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history. — Jennifer Chiaverini

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse. — Rachel Kushner

I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art ... that people actually paid for it. — Wade Guyton

Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have. — Chloe Sevigny

New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. — Sol LeWitt

Art that's blind to the true landscape we inhabit - physical reality in the widest sense - is just absurdly, pathetically blinkered and myopic.
So while I'm sure that the individual works I've written have only succeeded to varying degrees, I'm still proud to have done something to nudge the center of gravity of contemporary SF some microscopic distance towards a genuine engagement with reality." -Greg Egan — Karen Burnham

Most people seem to resent the controversial in music; they don't want their listening habits disturbed. They use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be used as a soporific. Contemporary music, especially, is created to wake you up, not put you to sleep. It is meant to stir and excite you, to move you
it may even exhaust you. But isn't that the kind of stimulation you go to the theater for or read a book for? Why make an exception for music? — Aaron Copland

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it. — Tony Tulathimutte

Hey, I'm an art lover," protested Ramirez. "I love Thomas Kinkade. Painter of Light, you know what I'm sayin'?"
Beverly's smile froze. "Yes, quite. — Linda Morris

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

Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture. — Alexander Stoddart

The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity. — Charlotte Bydler

While 'The Endless Summer' poster was designed at the Art Center College of Design in the contemporary style of its time, the image grew out of my relationship with Rick Griffin and our deep relationship to surf images. — John Van Hamersveld

It is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public ... should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life. — Leo Steinberg

My aim is to communicate with the last man in the audience. Art minus communication is meaningless. The term 'abhinaya' is not just facial expressions. It means drawing the spectator to an idea. Look at the modern advertisements. It's contemporary abhinaya. But one who creates should know what has to be completely and what has to be suggestively portrayed. That is ethical aesthetics. The Natyasastra says a production must be such that a family should be able to watch it together. — Padma Subrahmanyam

The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different. — David Adjaye

And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day. — Mark Zero

In contemporary art or movies, it makes perfect sense to be focused on the bleeding edge, on the new idea that's never been previously contemplated. But when we're discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what's new. — Seth Godin

When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly... — Mark Zero

How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead? — Mark Zero

I cast people from right around me. I was at my alma mater. It's special to have most of the graduate students in it [and] one professor, because I feel like in terms of this school, I was one of the few students lucky enough to break into the art industry or the contemporary art world. — Kalup Linzy

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

All too often people say to artists, 'To be an artist is fine if your art can be used for evangelism.' And art has often become a tool for evangelism. But let's be precise. As such there is nothing against this. But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God; if Christ came to make us human, the humanity and the reality of art find their foundation in him. So art should not be used to preach even if it can help. Yet there is another way that art can be or is meaningful. — H.R. Rookmaaker

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

Finding a master of the dark art of ninjutsu in modern westernized Japan seems as unlikely as finding an active practitioner of the magic of Merlin in contemporary industrialized England. — Stephen K. Hayes

The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design. — Jerry Saltz

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

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

In fact, scientists have taken advantage of this effect by using the amount of red in contemporary paintings of sunsets to estimate the intensity of volcanic eruptions. Several Greek scientists, led by C. S. Zerefos, digitally measured the amount of red - relative to other primary colors - in more than 550 samples of landscape art by 181 artists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries to produce estimates of the amount of volcanic ash in the air at various times. Paintings from the years following the Tambora eruption used the most red paint; those after Krakatoa came a close second. — William K. Klingaman

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation. — Paul Di Filippo

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

A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. "The ritual scarification of light and shadow," I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design. — Carla Harryman

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

Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining. — David Levithan

I avoid contemporary TV ... politics ... art: all too frantic, fevered, and frivolous, or else angry, bitter. — Dean Koontz

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 had no idea what to expect moving to New York. It's embarrassing to say, but I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art ... that people actually paid for it ... I know that's really dumb. I was really naive. I had no idea artists made money. — Wade Guyton

Nursing may be the oldest art, but in the contemporary world, it is also one of the most invisible. One of the most invisible arts, sciences, and certainly one of the most invisible parts of our health care system. — Suzanne Gordon

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