Quotes & Sayings About Modernism

Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history. — Joseph Kerman

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier. — Ellen Lupton

He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him
of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit. — Robert Musil

I Dolci Libri

Rizzoli, the famed Italian purveyor of art tomes has over the years produced an entire library of gorgeous coffee table books. With the additional Universe imprint and partnerships with Flammarion and Skira the company has upped the ante on modernism in hardcover with a stack of architecture and design books that are as much nourishment for the mind as cannoli for the eye. Rizzoli's editors have their fingers on the pulse of what's happening right now and next in design in the United States and abroad. — Metropolitan Home

Modernism probably wouldn't have happened without lesbians in Paris. — Diana Souhami

Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment. — Paul Kurtz

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. — Roger Scruton

The only word in the Martian language is written phonetically:
Kay-ray-kh-kuh-ko-kex.
It means whatever you want it to mean. — Blaise Cendrars

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder's widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn's museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: "Our stuff looks tinny compared to it." At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society's most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever. — Martin Filler

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal. — Paul Bowles

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was - perhaps rightly - scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. — Thomas Keneally

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything! — Joseph Conrad

When I read the documents relative to the Modernism, as it was defined by Saint Pius X, and when I compare them to the documents of the II Vatican Council, I cannot help being bewildered. For what was condemned as heresy in 1906 was proclaimed as what is and should be from now on the doctrine and method of the Church. In other words, the modernists of 1906 were, somewhat, precursors to me. My masters were part of them. My parents taught me Modernism. How could Saint Pius X reject those that now seem to be my precursors? — Jean Guitton

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty. — Will Self

Why is it that the musical public is seemingly so reluctant to consider a musical composition as, possibly, a challenging experience? When I hear a new piece of music that I do not understand I am intrigued - I want to make contact with it again at the first opportunity. It's a challenge - it keeps my interest in the art of music thoroughly alive. If, after repeated hearings, a work says nothing to me, I do not therefore conclude that modern composition is in a sorry condition. I simply conclude that that piece is not for me. — Aaron Copland

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with ... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past. — Will Self

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. — Italo Svevo

The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It's the atomic age! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks 'modern'; ergo, Japan is supremely modern. — Alex Kerr

Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time. — Walter Darby Bannard

Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion. — Odd Nerdrum

I remain interested in the potential of art, except I've always been more struck by applied modernism than high modernism. It's partly because of feminist theory and being brought up in the '70s, with questioning who is speaking, and why, and what authority they're carrying. — Liam Gillick

That was the way with Moldenke, a brightly burning candle with a shortened wick, destined to burn low and give off gas. — David Ohle

In art we do not make things any simpler by making simpler things. Reduction does not yield certainty, but something like its opposite, which is ambiguity and multi-valence. — Kirk Varnedoe

I think as someone who collects beautiful things from the past, the thing that I miss the most about modernism and the things I lament about the past are everyday things that you would use were made more beautifully. — Dita Von Teese

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths. — Miguel Syjuco

There seemed to be as much written about the art, and what the dialogue meant, as the paintings themselves. Clement Greenburg had been the first of many. It drove her crazy, the convoluted doubletalk of artist and medium and historian. Though she loved the process of creation and the images themselves, she found it difficult to put her thoughts into words. — Danika Stone

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it. — Eric Hoffer

The global nature of the religious knowledge of a learned Muslim sitting in Isfahan in the fourteenth century was very different from that of a scholastic thinker in Paris or Bologna of the same period. On the basis of the Quranic doctrine of religious universality and the vast historical experiences of a global nature, Islamic civilization developed a cosmopolitan and worldwide religious perspective unmatched before the modern period in any other religion. This global vision is still part and parcel of the worldview of traditional Muslims, of those who have not abandoned their universal vision as a result of the onslaught of modernism or reactions to this onslaught in the form of what has come to be called fundamentalism. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things. — Marcel Proust

Cruise through the gargantuan sites - YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! - and it's as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web's aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. — Virginia Heffernan

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. — Nick Harkaway

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. — G.K. Chesterton

Postmodernism's collapse into indeterminacy is a significant weakness, yet its recognition of the implications of narratives, communities, embodiment, history, race, sex, and class make aspects of it attractive. We resist modernism's arch-rationalism as dehumanizing and its thoroughgoing scientism as reductionistic, and yet we recognize the value of its contributions. Though — David K. Naugle

Do you want to know why I don't like the so-called connoisseurs of arts? I hate hypocrisy. I'll give you an example: if the movie is colored and tells us about two friends who sit in the pool, fart into the water, get out of the pool and fart into each other's face it will be thrash, a lack of a culture and a third-rate comedy. But if the movie is black-and-white and tells us about two friends who cross the desert and peeing on each other, shit on the sand, and then they eat each other's shit, and on top of that they fucking each other's ass it will be a brilliant art house movie. — Ilze Falb

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs. — Vivian Gornick

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. — Paul Rand

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. — C.S. Lewis

Post-modernism, which has probably lasted longer than modernism, is the process of interrogating the aesthetic discourse. Disrupting the narrative. Modernism says that things can be right. Post-modernism says that nothing can be right. So if you ever wonder why nothing new ever seems to happen any more, find a post-modernist and beat the shit out of then. Wyndham — Warren Ellis

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.' — Brad Holland

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth. — James K.A. Smith

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects. — Roger Zelazny

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present. — John Berger

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground. — Will Self

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. — Jean Baudrillard

In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say. — William E. Hordern

Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs. — David Foster Wallace

Innocence and purity have become a symbol of stupidity, but that's
nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It's sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There's nothing to be achieved by it. That's more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words. — Karl Ove Knausgard

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism. — Pope Pius XI

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement. — Martin Filler

Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

The problem with modernism is that we actually believe, naively and arrogantly, that we can in some way hold any concept and grasp it - and if we cannot, they it is absurd and impossible and therefore nonexistent. — Tobin Wilson

The day of heroes has passed," Uncle Edwarn said. "The stories of people breaking out of history belong to another world. We have reached an era of modernism, both louder and more silent at the same time. You watch. Where once kings and warriors shaped the world, now quiet men in offices will do the same - and do it far, far more effectively. — Brandon Sanderson

This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a
Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football's version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it. — Nick Hornby

In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness. — Robert Hughes

The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea. — Max Raphael

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out. — Robert Hewison

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans. — Noam Chomsky

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. — Clement Greenberg

Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two. — Tadao Ando

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. — Jane Goldman

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly. — Arthur Erickson

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science. — Larry Wall

The Christian message isn't burdened down by the miraculous. It's inextricably linked to it. A woman conceives. The lame walk. The blind see. A dead man is resurrected, ascends to heaven, and sends the Spirit. The universe's ruler is a Jewish laborer from Nazareth, who is on his way to judge the living and the dead. Those who do away with such things are left with what modernism's dissenting prophet, J. Gresham Machen, rightly identified as a different religion, a religion as disconnected from global Christianity as the New Age religion of Wicca is from the ancient Druidic rites. — Russell D. Moore

Every period had its style: why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style? By "style" was meant ornament. I said, "weep not. Behold! What makes our period so important is that it is incapable of producing new ornament. We have out-grown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, the capital of heaven. It is then that fulfilment will have come. — Adolf Loos

The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence. — Virginia Woolf

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's. — Walter Darby Bannard

That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains. — Douglas Wilson

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades. — Martin Filler

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference. — John Walford

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism. — Leslie Fiedler

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff. — Philip Pullman

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord's work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them. — Francis A. Schaeffer

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. — C.S. Lewis

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? — John Crowe Ransom

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom. — Arthur Erickson

Devise some creed, and live it, beyond theirs,
Or I shall think you but their spendthrift heirs. — Edmund Blunden

Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past — Roger Scruton

[ ... ] a familiar art historical narrative [ ... ] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [ ... ] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. — Grant H. Kester

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism. — Christian Lacroix

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's ... — Philip Pullman

Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility
space itself
to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity. — Michel De Certeau

Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here. — Magnus Flyte

We entered an era of false alarms. — Sara Novic

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America ... — Sarah Vowell

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. — Jonathan Lethem

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. — Liam Gillick

For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Gorecki, you know, there's a kind of personal thing there for me. I had, you know, kind of become obsessed with that sort of Soviet Bloc period. And actually, a lot of composers in the Soviet Bloc - Gorecki's not the only one - are writing for the harpsichord as a sort of reaction against enforced Soviet realism, expressionism, sort of enforced modernism. — Mahan Esfahani

Those wretches tainted with the error of Indifferentism and Modernism hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute, but relative: that is, that it must adapt itself to the varying necessities of the times and the varying dispositions of souls, since it is not contained in an unchangeable revelation, but is, by its very nature, meant to accommodate itself to the life of man. — Pope Pius XI

You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything. — Ben Van Berkel

He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? — Stephen King

In India there's no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man's face and you'll find an old man's mind. — Meghna Pant

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

And that's how we lost our ways, because more than modernism we like to love its distorted appearance. — M.H. Rakib

There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.' — Raymond Loewy