Henry Flynt Quotes

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

I have a strong art-history background.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.

The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

I want to know art.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'

I never really took a proper art class in college. I just started reading art magazines and going to galleries. I was really drawn to it.

I was truly ignorant about art before the film.

I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Drawings, paintings, and sculptures. That's the three pillars of art academia.