Words matter. These are the best Modernism Quotes from famous people such as Will Self, Ali Smith, John Tavener, John Crowe Ransom, Skeet Ulrich, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it’s really a celebration of our existence.
‘Canticum Sacrum’ is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern – and all in 17 minutes.
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
Because of the need to remove all modernism, we stayed in the middle of nowhere all day long, living out of tents. It was cold. It definitely set the scene.
A lot of ’20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.
In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don’t believe this, just think how many times you’ve described some real event as being ‘just like a movie.’
Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.
There’s the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it’s had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.
The role of the architect as artist is an ancient one, but it was de-emphasized with the rise of modernism, which rejected the drawing-based Beaux-Arts tradition in favor of a more technocratic approach.
What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.
French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.
Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.
Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where ‘open form’ or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term ‘heightened speech.’
My definition of modernism took a while to develop.
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is ‘Kafkaesque’ is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism – even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like ‘The Hunger Artist.’ Nothing is like ‘The Metamorphosis.’
Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn’t reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow – and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.
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.
A ‘modern’ man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.
When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.
I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I’m going the other way. I don’t want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.
Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.
I’m really a fighter against modernism equaling brutalism.
I grew up in a modernist house, in a modernist culture. There was a love for modernism everywhere – the furniture, the books, the food, even the cutlery. So I learned very early to appreciate the value of design and the value of architecture.
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.
I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it… It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me.
I think as someone who collects beautiful things from the past, the thing that I miss the most about modernism and the things I lament about the past are everyday things that you would use were made more beautifully.
We try to turn buildings into landscapes – defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.
Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.
Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.
I’m English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.
