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Contemporary Art Quotes

Browse 118 quotes about Contemporary Art.

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Contemporary Art Quotes

“In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand.”

IfsWellsHeartArtSaidHandsValuesLossRevolutionConceptsGainsVocabularyAbsentContemporary ArtNew WordsHead And HeartGreat ValueCommercial Art
Author:R. O. Blechman
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“Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads, and starts spreading that old gospel according to Hyperbole. No questions asked... And thus the bill of goods is sold, all along the line. An art historical snake, swallowing its own tale.”

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Author:Abe Ajay
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“(...) contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. (...) For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existencial channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests”

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Author:Sarah Thornton
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“It's no longer terribly sexy to own shares in certain companies; it used to be that being a shareholder in a corporation would connect you with it. The result is that people really want to invest in valuable things, and contemporary art has become a very stable material value with great growth potential.”

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Author:Thomas Koerfer
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“Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.”

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Author:Odd Nerdrum
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“Contemporary art and manga - what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators.”

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Author:Takashi Murakami
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“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.”

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Author:Adamo Macri
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“The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.”

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Author:David Adjaye
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“The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.”

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Author:Slavoj Žižek
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“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.”

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Author:Robert Montgomery
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“People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible.”

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Author:Liam Gillick
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“I cast people from right around me. I was at my alma mater. It's special to have most of the graduate students in it [and] one professor, because I feel like in terms of this school, I was one of the few students lucky enough to break into the art industry or the contemporary art world.”

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Author:Kalup Linzy
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“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.”

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Author:Robert Barry
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“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.”

ArtI CanWholeCareArtistAcceptingVisionCasesAudienceReflectionUnderstoodAssumingDepthNotionContemporaryDirtyCynicalViewersPopulismContemporary ArtDirty WordsUnintelligent
Author:Dario Robleto
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