Cathy Marie Buchanan Quotes

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

'The Art of the Brick' is an exhibition I've done where I've taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks.

Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn.

At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated. It's only now, with the patina of history, that we can really see these masterpieces in a clear light.

When I look back now, it must have been like Paris was at the time of Le Sacre du Printemps.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

Whether it be in comics, games or film, you can trace the art direction and influences back to some earlier, real-life historic period or artistic movement.

In any film there's always a historical implication.

The day I decided I didn't want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going 'ooh' and 'aah,' the way they do around the Monets. It just doesn't happen.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.

I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945.

Let Rome’s art tell the empire’s story.

I go to contemporary galleries all around the world when I can. There's always something historical and something contemporary; those are my rock references.

Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.

We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

Why make a biopic if it's not somehow helping us now? There's really no point. If it's not informing how we can do things differently now and maybe not repeat our mistakes, than why do this piece about this person or this event?

the history of melancholia includes all of us.