Postmodern Art Quotes

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art.

We are engaging with so many art forms at once in the 21st century, but we're presented with them in a way that is so isolated.

I'm super into dudes like Megazord, Jon Rafman, Rasmus Emanuel Svensson, Tabor Robak, and Michael Willis to name a few.

What I'm working on is for people to be able to say that Kippenberger had this really good mood.

Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.

I think 21st century should be art without objects.

I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.

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.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.

I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.

Does art have to have high foot traffic to get funded in a recession? A lot of people, I am sure, would say absolutely not. And those postmodern art-loving loners surely would argue that even if one person likes a piece of art, that would make a museum worthwhile.

But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid. I think you see that nowadays, in this postmodern context, there's much more use of different mediums in contemporary art. For me, if you're a creative person, you can choose to make a painting, you can choose to make a film.

There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.