Michael Haneke Quotes

I guess I'm part of the art house, but we really have to shake up our ideas, because we're kind of self-parodying ourselves. We go places commercial cinema doesn't go, but sometimes it's to our own detriment.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things.

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.

Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

Just like my career, I've sung the same songs night after night in so many ways. It's always different because every space is different. I lost my mojo once. It was like Austin Powers. I don't know why or how, but I had to get it back. And I did.

After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.

He [Andy Warhol] engaged people and I think all of that is what helped keep him keyed in to the times beyond all of the celebrity stuff that was going on around him. He was much more like a fan than a celebrity himself.

Sometimes it's just the creative intent of an artist or band that inspires me. I'm generally drawn to artists or bands that put themselves out on a limb somewhat and do something that infuriates both the mainstream and the indie purists, but that can't necessarily be classed as either. To me it seems somewhat convenient to be on either end of that scale.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

I can strip down basic principles of certain things and apply it to everything else. And that keeps you interested, changing the art form, making it more avant-garde. Because I can't play any instruments.

Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.