John Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic ... The industrial revolution was a blight ... Printed by William Morris. ibid.
The greatest Gothic painter of the twentieth century is Francis Bacon. ibid.
We’re all Gothic now. ibid.
Men with earrings and converted warehouse studios in the East End … No to genius, no to beauty, no to art where you can tell what’s happening. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art I: I Am a Genius ***** Channel 4 1999
Modern art today is full of words and full of sounds. ibid.
Along the corridor of time is a real genius with a big pen, the biggest pen of all, the pen of Pablo drawing. ibid.
Today, modern art is a real pig, a pig sawn in half with a chainsaw and suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde. Or it’s a photo of a blankly staring post-feminist woman of the ’90s. Or a tent by another woman artist embroidered with the names of everyone she’s ever slept with. ibid.
Modern art is a mixture of snob culture and amazing open-mindedness like Andy Warhol. Modern art is a system but one that’s always changing. On the other hand he also stands for a kind of atrophying of the restless modern art mind. ibid.
Big Cigar of modernity – Picasso. This is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. ibid.
Sarah Lucas, defiant women of the ’90s, icon of young British art, up against the wall defiantly redefining what it means to be modern. ibid.
He [Picasso] stands for ceaseless creativity, not caring, not being snobbish, having his own system, never being polite. ibid.
Sex and death – Picasso’s great themes. This is a picture of his friend who committed suicide. ibid.
Cubism: it made the painting more important than the picture; it made inventing more important than copying; it meant reality could be gutted and boned and put back together again as something else – as art. ibid.
He didn’t have to care because a big support system of mythology and market was doing all that for him … The system of the modern artist as entrepreneur and showman. ibid.
New York started taking over modern art in the Second World War. By the 1950s the job was complete. ibid.
Jackson Pollock, artist of the abstract drip, doomed for ever to be a cliché. What do we see when we see a Jackson Pollock? We see what Pollock stands for. Jackson Pollock stands for freedom and self-expression and being American. ibid.
He was a giant of American art. ibid.
We see the whole tragedy of Pollock’s life. Towards the end of it he couldn’t paint at all: he was a depressed alcoholic. ibid.
The Abstract Expressionist’s moment was the 1950s. ibid.
And that was what was going on in Jackson Pollock’s head? ibid.
Pollock’s was a mystery art of pure abstraction. ibid.
He was world famous. Yet he didn’t know where to go. ibid.
Here’s Warhol with his icons of modern life – modern celebrity, modern glamour, modern sexiness … ‘Art is dead,’ said Warhol. ibid.
This is Pittsburgh where Warhol was born in 1928. He lived here with his mother and father who came over from Czechoslovakia … Warhol was always ill as a child. ibid.
Hi. Do you like being afraid? Fed up with order and harmony and the world all making sense and being the right way up, want a lot of sudden noises and horror and obscenity? Try modern art. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art II: Shock! Horror!
Modern art is obscure, it’s elegant, it’s strange, it’s interesting, but more and more it’s shocking … The grim-stream has become the mainstream, and most people think shocks are pretty much all that modern art ever was. ibid.
Of course you want to see disgusting sex mutant children and cans of artist’s shit and rotting cows’ heads. ibid.
Madrid: This is where the Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, lived and worked. He was an artists of the Enlightenment but he lived through an appalling war. The result was the first big shock art of the modern era. ibid.
The real father of modern art … Goya: the father of shocks. ibid.
They [pictures] seems to mirror from two centuries ago the weirdness and randomness and blackness of the world we live in. ibid.
Damien Hurst’s shark seems at home with Goya, just swimming in a different direction … Now it’s an icon. ibid.
How blank can you get? Art asks. How shockingly vivid and vile can you be? ibid.
Sarah Lucas: I like the shock of this artist because she had the idea of trying to put feelings back into alienated modern art. ibid.
Tracey Emin: Real shocks and staged shocks … Britain’s best known young British artist behaving badly: here she is plunging a polite modern art chat show into chaotic darkness. ibid.
Or her painful autobiographic subject matter of harrowing abortions, teenage rape, and broken-up tortured love affairs. ibid.
Edvard Munch: The Scream. ibid.
Francis Bacon: Britain’s best-known artist of frightful horrors … He was always completely outside the official modern art story. ibid.
He’s just goes straight for it – the big hits one after another. ibid.
The spooky world of Gilbert & George. This Morecambe and Wise of existentialism, alienated middle-aged visionary gay guys imitating repressed 1930s bank managers who call themselves living sculptures and who have made their nutty image permanently identifiable with the sites and atmosphere of London’s East End began their act 30 years ago. ibid.
Gilbert & George chose annoyance as their main material. They had real lives before but from now on they would always be artificial – because it was more real. Their whole lives would be art even when they were drunk which was every day on gin. Everything they did they called a sculpture. Sculpture included singing or falling over but also taking photographs and writing and making up slogans. ibid.
More America: It’s a modern art road movie. ibid.
Jake & Dinos Chapman: The stars are two actresses, and a third participant – a disembodied head with a penis nose. ibid.
The Chapmans’ film is an offshoot from the works they are notorious for – their children’s mannequins, hyper realistic, hyper horrible. ibid.
Modern Art & Beauty: What is beauty? People think art must be beautiful, that beauty is art’s main purpose. But modern art people strangely don’t think that. In fact in modern art today beauty is completely out as a purpose. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art III: Lovely Lovely
This is the leader of the beauty cult: Henri Matisse who’ll never be annoying, just nice. ibid.
I could never understand the idea of Matisse; he didn’t seem to have an idea. He was always talked about in terms of beautiful colour … Then I got the idea, it’s beauty itself that Matisse stands for. ibid.
Matisse made traditional western art new by mixing in non-western things like distortion. ibid.
Ezra Pound: ‘Modern art isn’t about destroying the loveliness of the past but about reinventing it to make it fit the present.’ ibid.
Everything in Patrick Heron’s paintings is abstract and pure. At the same time, it all comes from things he’s seen – the rocks, and hills and fields and flowers, his garden, the harbours, the sea, the light around the house in Cornwall where he lives. ibid.
He [Matisse] also stands for awkwardness and oddness turning into beauty. ibid.
Formalism meant shapes and colours good, recognisable imagery and illusion bad … The death of Formalism was like the 70s stadium rock bands start dying like dinosaurs. Only in this case with no chance of a big 1990s comeback tour. ibid.
Formalism was an idea about beauty, that it was beauty reduced to colour and flatness … But then suddenly a cold wind blew on flatness. ibid.
Basquiat: These are painting from someone who couldn’t help but paint incredibly well … In fact he couldn’t help but be a star, to be beautiful. Jean-Michel Basquiat as a graffiti artist, spray-painting imagery and words on the New York subway. ibid.
By 1982 he had been taken up by a gallery and had his first one-man show. It was off the streets and in the art world. And he immediately became famous. He was the first black art star. He stayed successful for 6 years, during that time became increasingly distracted by drugs until finally dying of a heroin overdose in 1988 aged only 27.. ibid.
People think [Jean-Michel] Basquiat is either only superficial or amazingly soulful. No-one says he’s actually an artist as good as Matisse but I think he is. ibid.
Basquiat’s colour is very strong but incredibly subtly orchestrated. ibid.
You can make odd things work together in a beautiful way. ibid.