Aesthetic Shift Quotes

While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship.

I'm one of those people who says, 'yes, cinema died when they invented sound.'

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit; as Athens.

The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.

Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

People will get tired of overly retouched images soon and they'll want something different. If people have too much reality, they want fantasy. What matters most is what the image communicates. I remember the first roll of film I shot at high school, the contact sheet went from these really worthy images of cracks in the wall and ended up with all of my dancer friends naked in Renaissance poses.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch

It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Music is all of a sudden much more colorful.

I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.

What I've been trying to do with my art, which has been feeling very graphically sharp - to soften it up and make it feel more hand-done.

It was supposed to be gross, and now it's gorgeous.