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Quote by Claes Oldenburg

“I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.”

Quote by Claes Oldenburg

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Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg is a renowned American sculptor, known for his large-scale public art installations. His works are inspired by everyday objects, reimagined and magnified to create both familiar and unfamiliar visual experiences. more

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“I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.”

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Book:Claes Oldenburg: an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum, the Tate Gallery, London 24 June - 16th August 1970
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“I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

ArtFormLinesStupidSweetHeavyTwistsSpitBluntCoarse
Book:Claes Oldenburg: an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum, the Tate Gallery, London 24 June - 16th August 1970
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“I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.”

ArtRealCharacterUseTurnsSituationKnownSubjectsPossibilityApproachCreatingFunctionScalesCompromiseLandscapeIntimateDimensionsParadoxImaginaryCreating Art
Author:Claes Oldenburg
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“Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.'”

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Author:Niles Eldredge
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“Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process. Few saw any reason to demur - though it is a startling fact that ...most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages.”

Has BeensReasonFactsAgeProcessNaturalSawsExampleProductsTransformationSeriesSpeciesVariousVainFossilsSequenceWholesale
Author:Niles Eldredge
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“The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.”

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Author:Niles Eldredge
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