229 Quotes About Modernity

All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.

When nations grow old the Arts grow coldAnd commerce settles on every tree

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the 'Ode to Joy' that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.

..in contemporary modern music, the working out is so intellectual that the extempore act does not give the modernist time to concoct anything he himself would consider significant

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.