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

  Ai Weiwei

  Democracy, Soil, Wealth

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Work, Merit

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• 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

  Calligraphy, Different, Asceticism

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• Painting is... a correspondence between what you are and what you see. It's a moment when something is holding together in such a way that it is a universe in itself... Within this is a test and also a judgment upon yourself, your capabilities, your promises, and the part that you play in the world. And nobody else can test that for you. Certainly not the Museum of Modern Art.

  Milton Resnick

  Art, Museums, Play

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• I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

  Peggy Guggenheim

  Art, Order, Abstract

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• Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

  James Elkins

  Moving, Giving, Looks

  "Are Artists Bored by Their Work?" by James Elkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 15, 2010.

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

  Harold Rosenberg

  Color, Drawing, Form

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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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• 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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• 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 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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• A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Firsts, Modern, Ends

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