The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.
[Studying a Miró painting] Raymond Deagan: So, what's your opinion on modern art? Cathy Whitaker: It's hard to put into words, really. I just know what I care for and what I don't. Like this... I don't know how to pronounce it... Mira? Raymond Deaga...
I always thought martial arts was the most modern choreography we could have right now, and I always wanted to put it to music.
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler
When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourse...
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.
In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties--the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were ...
There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
Pollock said several times that he couldn't separate himself from his art. Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, I was much more his persona - his struggles as a human being - that was interesting to me.
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo ...
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of langu...
