Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

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

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

New arts destroy the old.

When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

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

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

And their pals vote for their stuff when they're not on the panel, and it just keeps going that way. And they tend to be very fringe artists, so anything before the 20th century is not worth considering. This is out of date.

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.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

It's always been performance art, but now it's on a different level.

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.

In my opinion, the true pioneers are those artists who make manifest in their works the new content, the determining characteristics of life in our time.

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.