In all these places I was looking at and thinking deeply about nothing. In the world of now there are artists painting blank canvases – paintings of nothing. Because in modern art shocks matter, beauty matters, but nothing matters too. Why does modern art endlessly return to blanks and emptiness? Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? IV: Nothing Matters
Modern artists making something out of nothing. ibid.
Robert Rauschenberg: ‘There’s the meaning of the experience of seeing it [white canvass].’ ibid.
Rothko was appalled by a lot of modern art. The way it was going … And we’ve given him the job of being our tragic artist of nothingness. ibid.
The Rothko Chapel: His paintings here are the grandest, darkest, blackest, most unfathomable ones he ever made. Bloody hell, they’re black. ibid.
Yves Klein: This is International Klein Blue (IKB), an ultra-marine pigment Klein patented in his own name to make monograms with. The sound you’re hearing is the sound of an orchestra playing, a whole orchestra, one note. ibid.
Klein’s theatracality is very much in tune with nowadays. ibid.
He really was a judo expert. He really was a member of the secret society of Rosicrucians. ibid.
Klein was a performer, an alchemist, an inspired fantasist. His void was a theatrical void and a magic void. ibid.
And now the blue void which Yves Klein finally disappeared into June 6th 1962, aged 34, after his 3rd heart attack. ibid.
Nothingness became very big in New York’ art, almost the main thing. ibid.
Minimal Art and Conceptual Art – the other two big movements in New York art of the ’60s after Pop Art. ibid.
Minimalism came out in the early 1960s: it was the hardest look modern art had yet come up with. ibid.
Was the object still art when nobody was looking at it? ibid.
The Tate Gallery bricks: Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre … Andre’s stripping down to almost nothing. ibid.
[Donald] Judd: he’s one of modern art’s most powerful father figures: no-one can kill him. He’s certainly an authority for me – boxes live on. ibid.
The trademark Judd look is a factory-fabricated, machine-made look. It had to be made just so, and it had to be placed just so. ibid.
But if Donald Judd is awesome, a modern art father figure, he is a rather Old Testament figure … His own art is becoming part of a tourist industry [Texas]. ibid.
[Richard] Serra was a mythic artist in the last ’60s movement of Post-minimalism … Post-minimalism, a type of minimalism [Richard] Serra stands for, was minimalism that was curvy or scattered rather than square or cubified. ibid.
Emptiness: post-modern art of the ’70s and ’80s was an art where all the old meanings were drained out. ibid.
Glenn Brown: Zombies of the Stratosphere, 1998. ibid.
Jokes: modern art is full of them. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art V: Hollow Laughter
Marcel Duchamp: iconic, laconic, sardonic, wry, dry, a bit austere, a bit erotic, a cool French guy, never disturbed, always amused, always ready with a sardonic joke. ibid.
The stream of black off-humour that runs through the art of the 20th century. ibid.
And this is the biggest of all … Fountain is an ordinary old urinal bought in a shop, signed R Mutt 1917 and sent to a big exhibition in New York … The great satan of modern art: Michel Duchamp. ibid.
Irony is at the heart of Duchamp’s output. ibid.
New York: Artists can be big stars here and sell their art for a lot of money. ibid.
Art that questions the meaning of art: we’re all used to that now. ibid.
Art nowadays is full of texts. ibid.
Rene Magritte, the most popular surrealist ever next to Salvador Dali. Magritte: the artist of the bowler hat and the pipe that wasn’t one. ibid.
Magritte’s joke is the joke of the wrong label, the wrong word for the image, the wrong thought for the word, the wrong feeling for the thought … but it is beautiful in a way. ibid.
[Alessandro] Manzoni: Artists’s shit, each one individually signed. When he first sold them they cost their weight in gold. Now they’re worth much more. ibid.
Money, Shit, Art: the holy trinity. ibid.
The shock of the now and the anxieties we have about the art of now. How do we evaluate it with all the publicity and hype and money that surrounds it. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art VI: The Shock of the Now
The shock of the realistic … It’s the shock of the incredibly realistic nose-hairs, that stubble, the red of the eyes, it’s a kind of freak. ibid.
The anxiety of repetition. The main anxiety of now: the anxiety of art coming round again and again. ibid.
When he was young Dali was a tortured romantic artist, a friend of poets full of lofty ideals; then he became known as a betrayer of them. This is him painting General Franco’s niece. ibid.
Salvador Dali is modern art’s big problem … The hardcore modern artists rejected him: they said he was only a publicity seeker, he was only commercial. ibid.
I don’t think Dali was a phoney though … I admire him for being an artist who followed his impulses. ibid.
Jeff Koons: An artist who stands as a giant at the gates of now with his back to the past, always positive, never anxious. And this is his workshop. In the ’80s he saw banality everywhere and thought it should be embraced. ibid.
Koons’s giant puppy made of flowers as big as a five-storey building. ibid.
In reality the new is never all that new. ibid.
He’s been an art star for 30 years. Bruce Nauman is all about words … ideas and images all coming together to make art. ibid.
Nauman’s art fits right in with the trendy art of today. ibid.
The cult of the warehouse gallery which started in the ’80s: it led to the huge popular explosion of successful young British artists. ibid.
This is impressionism: nice, isn’t it? … medium-sized arrangements of delectable charming colours, a total absence of darkness and a happy, woosy soft-edgeness everywhere. Matthew Collings, Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice, Channel 4 2004
Impressionism is the first movement of modern art. ibid.
The two artists who opened the door for impressionism were Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet … What unites them artistically is a radical idea: they think art should be real and not false. ibid.
Impressionism: the opposite to the overcooked look of salon art. ibid.
Courbet will make himself the leader and the personification of the realist style. ibid.
Courbet started painting enormous group portraits of his own people from his own region. ibid.
Manet’s take on the sensual is colour; Manet releases colour from being an add-on and makes it something in itself, not only something but the main thing. ibid.
Olympia is the kind of name high-class Parisian prostitutes sometimes took; so there’s no doubting what the scene is. ibid.
Manet’s visual freshness if profound. ibid.
Manet’s last major painting – a bar at the Folies Bergere. ibid.
What matters in Manet’s art is the sense of modern life. ibid.
The main impressionist was Claude Monet: reality, sensuality, colour – Monet’s inheritance from Manet. ibid.
Monet is making how a picture works be the exciting thing. ibid.
Impressionists lose money on the show but they don’t lose heart. ibid.
Here is that painting: Impression Sunrise. ibid.
Over the years he became a grand figure. ibid.
Paul Cézanne had an absolutely difficult personality … obsessive, solitary, right-wing and paranoid. ibid.
A devout Catholic … His painting is the most revolutionary type of art there’s ever been … he won’t tolerate any left-wing views. ibid.
Cézanne did about two hundred paintings of bathers. ibid.