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1 " Nothing can be done except little by little. "
― , What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell
2 " How do you make a profound and heartfelt anti-capitalist work of art, for example, if you've spent the previous evening at a swanky museum dinner sitting next to the head of some investment bank, who also happens to be one of your major collectors/clients? Or how do you make a work about the environment when your own carbon footprint is far larger than most? Can it be possible to produce a painting or sculpture that seeks to illuminate an unfairness in a society from which you are so obviously benefiting? And how do you go about criticizing the establishment, when you are a fully signed-up member of its inner circle? The answer is, you don't. "
3 " We'll be fine’, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: "Nothing can be done except little by little." That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something! "
4 " Art is always to an extent about trying to create order out of chaos. "
5 " An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves. "
6 " It is Duchamp who is to blame for the whole “is it art?” debate, which of course is exactly what he intended. As far as he was concerned, the role in society of an artist was akin to that of a philosopher; it didn’t even matter if he or she could paint or draw. An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves. "
7 " Henri Rousseau was a simple, poorly educated man with an air of innocent naïveté. The Montmartre crowd gave him the nickname “Le Douanier,” meaning “customs officer,” referring to his job as a tax collector. "
8 " The academy expected artists to make work based on mythology, religious iconography, history or classical antiquity in a style that idealized the subject. Such fakery didn’t interest this group of young, ambitious painters. They wanted to leave their studios and go outside to document the modern world around them. It was a bold move. Artists simply didn’t wander off and paint 'low' subjects such as ordinary people picnicking, or drinking or walking; it wasn’t the done thing. It would be like Steven Spielberg hiring himself out for wedding videos. "
9 " ambitious provincial towns and tourist-oriented countries wanting to “do a Bilbao”—that is, to transform their reputations and raise their profile by commissioning an eye-catching modern art gallery. "
10 " Duchamp thought it was for artists to decide what was and what was not a work of art. His position was that if an artist said something was a work of art, having influenced its context and meaning, then it was a work of art. "
11 " It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object. "
12 " That, he thought, was the essential purpose of art—to capture the universal in the everyday, which was particular to their here and now: the present. "
13 " Picasso is said to have once mused that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. "
14 " Duchamp protestaba por el hecho de que el medio —el lienzo, mármol, madera o piedra— hubiera, hasta ese momento, dictado al artista cómo él o ella tenían que operar en el proceso de hacer una obra de arte. El medio se encontraba en primer plano y la tarea del artista era proyectar en él sus ideas a través de la pintura, la escultura o el dibujo. Duchamp quería darle la vuelta a la situación. Consideraba que el medio era secundario: lo principal y más importante era la idea. Solo después de que un artista hubiera desarrollado un concepto podía estar en posición de elegir un medio, y este tenía que ser aquel en el que la idea se pudiera expresar de la mejor manera. "
15 " He considered the medium to be secondary: first and foremost was the idea. Only after an artist had settled on and developed a concept would he or she be in a position to choose a medium, and it should be the one with which the idea could most successfully be expressed. And if that meant using a porcelain urinal, so be it. In essence, art could be anything as long as the artist said so. That was a big idea. "
16 " Paint, for the Impressionists, became a medium whose material properties were being celebrated as opposed to being disguised behind the artifice of a pictorial illusion. "
17 " The museum says the information is for the uninitiated visitor, but the truth is that, on occasion, it has been written for a handful of world experts in a language only art insiders would understand. "
18 " It is not unknown for the artist to fall into the same trap. I have interviewed brilliant artists who are rightly revered for the intelligence, insight and beauty of their work. And yet, when a microphone is placed under the artist’s nose, all that clarity vanishes. It’s not unusual to find that after listening to half an hour of sub-clauses, qualifications and meandering metaphor one is no nearer to understanding an artist’s work: further away, in fact. "
19 " In my experience it is the abstract artists—those who spend their lives stripping away detail to reveal a universal truth—who are the worse offenders when it comes to using flowery, imprecise language to describe their work. "
20 " ... je vaší povinností konzumovat a dopřávat si. Chcete-li jablko, utrhněte si dvě – jedno hned a druhé si nechte na později. "