Tobias Smollet - Friedrich Nietzsche - Jules Verne - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Matthew Collings TV - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV -
I grow up – Am hated by my relations – Sent to School – Neglected by my Grandfather – Maltreated by my Master – Seasoned to Adversity – I form Cabals against the Pedant – Am debarred access to my Grandfather – Hunted by his Heir – I demolish the teeth of his Tutor. Tobias Smollet, The Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. Friedrich Nietzsche
A well-used minimum suffices for everything. Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Minimalist: ‘A search for core values.’ Waldemar Januszczak, interview Great Artists in Their Own Words, BBC 2013
In the world of now there are artists painting blank canvases – paintings of nothing. Because in modern art shocks matter, beauty matter but nothing matters too. Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? IV: Nothing Matters, Channel 4 1999
Rothko – the artist who wanted the experience of looking at his paintings to be a breakdown and cry experience … Our tragic artist of nothingness. ibid.
Minimal art and Conceptual art – the other two big movements in New York art of the ’60s after Pop art. 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.
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.
The minimalists ... What the minimalists hated about pop art was its apparent celebration of the bright, gaudy tacky packaging in which American consumerism wrapped itself. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America: What Lies Beneath 3/3, BBC 2011