Modernism Quotes

• The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

  Albert Camus

  Feet, Intelligence, Mind

  Albert Camus (1963). “Carnets: 1942-1951”

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

  Arthur Erickson

  Artist, Gone, Constraints

  Arthur Erickson's Speech to McGill University School of Architecture, www.arthurerickson.com. October 21, 2000.

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• Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

  Bryan Appleyard

  World, May, Absence

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• Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

  Salvador Dali

  Modern, Bother, One Thing

  "Diary of a Genius" by Salvador Dali, Creation Books, (p. 42), 1998.

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• Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

  Paul de Man

  Desire, Wipe, Departure

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• What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Art, Mean, Way

  Louise Bourgeois, Donald Burton Kuspit (1988). “Bourgeois”, Vintage

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

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Attention, Realistic

  Clement Greenberg, John O'Brian (1995). “The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969”, p.86, University of Chicago Press

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• In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

  Guy Debord

  Modern, Accumulation, Representation

  Guy Debord (2012). “Society Of The Spectacle”, p.30, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

  Ai Weiwei

  Democracy, Soil, Wealth

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• I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

  Alexander Herzen

  Passion, Men, Feelings

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• War is the highest form of modern art.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Art, War, Modern

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• One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

  Wallace Stevens

  Time, Important, Modern

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.255, Vintage

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• When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

  Eric Hoffer

  Modernity, Industry

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• 

  The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Cities, Police

  1946 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.

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• Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Alzheimer's, Postmodernism, Alzheimer

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• In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Doe, Facts

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• Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins.

  Clement Greenberg

  Sacrifice, Rooms, Logic

  Clement Greenberg, Robert C. Morgan (2007). “Clement Greenberg, Late Writings”, Univ Of Minnesota Press

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• You are born modern, you do not become so.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Modern, Born, Postmodernism

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

  Edward Weston

  Art, Upheaval, Photographer

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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• 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

  Discipline, Design, Community

  Ellen Lupton (2014). “Thinking with Type”, p.174, Chronicle Books

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• Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Color, Drawing, Form

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• Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

  Gilbert Adair

  Past, Principles, Batteries

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• For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

  William Shakespeare

  Eye, Tongue, Wonder

  Sonnet 106

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• The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.

  Andrew Graham-Dixon

  World, Neurosis, Painting

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• Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

  Robert Hewison

  Taken, Optimism, Postmodern

  Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

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