Phyllis McGinley Quotes

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

Avant-garde is French for bullshit

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.

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.

I'm a text artist. It's an unsung art form because it's so ahead of its time.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

I'm an experimental artist in a field that doesn't celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

I don't know much about modern art, but I guess I am modern art.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

I've always liked artists like Chris Burden, who would take performances, put them in galleries, and then do things that were on the edge.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.

We're at this place where we're pushing the next stylistic envelope.

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

The more far-out artists, the better.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

Art fairs bring attention to up and coming artists and some amazing new works. They are a way to connect everyone with what's happening at the cutting edge of art, both new and historic.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

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.

Californian artists are kind of willing to push the limits a little bit further just because that's kind of our mentality in that state.