Aesthetic Revolution Quotes

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

I definitely believe that art is the best way to produce social change.

Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with 'The Jazz Singer' or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.

I think the job of artists is to stir things up.

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn't that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism.

Our art, in a sense, is quite revolutionary.

I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting but whatever it's worth I did it.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

After my time in Holland, an inner battle ensued in which I tried to free myself from the influence of Schinkelesque classicism.

When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art.

I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.

When art has changed, it's because the world was changing.

I didn't really start appreciating Picasso until a few years back. I didn't like him at all. But now I can see this world is crazy.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.