Contemporary Art Quotes

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art.

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.

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.

My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society.

Contemporary art hates you.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.

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.

Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

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

All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.

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

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time?

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

One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

There is no new wave, only the sea.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

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.

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

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.

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.

In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery.

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.

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.

Most people don't like to be confronted with an actual fact-of-life because it's difficult to metabolize. A painting of a bowl of fruit is much easier. It's for the same reason why we don't like going to the doctor. The diagnosis and x-rays are too honest. This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.

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.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art some time ago held a display of contemporary art at which $52,000 was awarded to American sculptors, painters, and artists in allied fields. The award for the best painting went to the canvas of an Illinois artist. It was described as "a macabre, detailed work showing a closed door bearing a funeral wreath." Equally striking was the work's title: "That which I should have done, I did not do."

Populism in contemporary art can become a dirty word. There is this notion that to not be understood is a reflection of depth. I'm sure this is true in some cases, but on the whole I can't accept this as a vision of art. There's something so cynical about assuming your audience is unintelligent or that artists shouldn't care about their viewers.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.