Top 33 Contemporary Art Quotes

I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn’t.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation.

For me it’s very important to turn Kiev into one of the main centers of contemporary art in the world. There is New York. There’s London. And there will be Kiev. Everyone will come and say, ‘Wow!’

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

By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.

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

I embrace the middle ground, because curiously it has more edge to it than the cutting edge. It has been a weirdly neglected path for the audience of contemporary art. Im making art not for people who dont like art, but for people who are interested but maybe alienated by the more esoteric pieces.

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

My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, ‘What would be the coolest is contemporary art – it will make me look young and interesting.’ I’m more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.

Delphine Lucielle’s paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.

We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

I’ve become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital – no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We’ve come into our own, finally.

We always have a great time touring Germany, but one of my favourite museums in the world is Museum Ludwig, an incredible contemporary art museum in Cologne. I could spend all day in it.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s when my dad had an art gallery, one of the things that frustrated me was the world seemed so tiny, and to appreciate contemporary art, you needed a history of art, a formal education. I was more interested in the people, and that’s why I went into the movie business in the first place.

I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.

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

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.

There’s traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that’s the last thing on an artist’s mind.

My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature – things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of way. I think that’s not right and that it’s just because they don’t understand the discourse.

I feel like contemporary art is everywhere now and with the rise of the internet, it’s so much easier to see what artists are doing and to follow their careers.

The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of way. I think that’s not right and that it’s just because they don’t understand the discourse. The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that’s where they pretty much parted company. Father… anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

It’s a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards – new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic – symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture – became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

I don’t like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who’s heavily involved in contemporary art, they’d say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don’t expect to like much of it.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn’t like contemporary art, so he didn’t give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.