Roberta Smith Quotes

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.

My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro.

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house.

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

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.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

The more far-out artists, the better.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

In my case, everything starts from Marcel Duchamp and the new expressive possibilities he gave us with his ready-mades. I transferred his artistic language into today's world, choosing, for example, to use pedestrian-crossing stripes as a symbol.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

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.

In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

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

I think that Damien Hirst putting a shark in a bath of formaldehyde is nothing.

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.

I'm not like any other artist, point blank.

I love surrealism.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

Anne Imhof is a powerful artist from Germany making work that is totally interdisciplinary.