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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

  Mason Cooley

  Despair, Found

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

  Ai Weiwei

  Democracy, Soil, Wealth

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• Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Alzheimer's, Postmodernism, Alzheimer

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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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• Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

  Tom Turner

  Art, Labels, Landscape

  Tom Turner (2014). “City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning”, p.11, Taylor & Francis

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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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• 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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• Much modern art is, at first sight, unnerving... in the contemporary world, we have come to expect instant response and immediate understanding.

  Nicholas Serota

  Art, Sight, Understanding

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• It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.

  James Elkins

  Art, Irrelevance, Ifs

  James Elkins (2011). “What Photography Is”, p.124, Routledge

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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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• Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.

  Hans Rookmaaker

  Spiritual, Art, Two

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• Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

  Theaster Gates

  Ethics

  "Theaster Gates’ Monastic Orders". Interview with Ann Binlot, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 22, 2014.

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