Bacon: The human condition theme: we are just sides of meat. The blurred hallucination realism. Erotic male flesh. Drinking with criminals and aristocrats … Bottle and glasses and toilets and sinks and sick. 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 thirty years ago. ibid.
Body art is back in fashion today. ibid.
The Chapmans’ film is an offshoot from the works they are most notorious for – their children mannequins: hyper-realistic, hyper-horrible. ibid.
Modern Art and 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. 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.
Ezra Pound: ‘Modern art isn’t about destroying the loveliness of the past but about reinventing it to make it fit the present.’ 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.
Finally dying of a heroin overdose in 1988 aged only 27. People think [Jean-Michel] Basquiat is either only superficial or amazingly soulful … Basquiat’s colour is very strong and incredibly subtly orchestrated. ibid.
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
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.
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 … Irony is at the heart of Duchamp’s output. ibid.
Most of us kind of think that art is quality. ibid.
Art that questions the meaning of art: we’re all used to that now. ibid.
Magritte’s joke is the joke of the wrong label … but it is beautiful in a way. ibid.
Mazoni: Artists’s shit, each one individually signed. When he first sold them they cost their weight in gold. How they’re worth much more. ibid.
The shock of the now and the anxieties we have about the art of now. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art VI: The Shock of the Now
Salvador Dali is modern art’s big problem … I don’t think Dali was a phoney though. ibid.
Jeff Koons: kittens and puppies and cakes and flowers and these blobs: ‘Within art I never have anxiety in life.’ ibid. Koons
In reality the new is never all that new. ibid.
Neuman’s art fits right in with the trendy art of today. ibid.
Now there are just as many grungy rundown old self-help amateur galleries and art spaces run by 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.
Civilisation is what we do to not just be our basic appetite-driven selves. It’s the higher realm. It’s people talking to each other through the objects and monuments they leave for future generations. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation II, BBC 2007
David and Goya depict the new startling world of human emotion … Their art is our witness. ibid.
Before Giotto the heavenly beings of religious art had been flat symbolic beings for a thousand years. With Giotta they’re rounded, they’re physical, they have human life. ibid.
See David’s mind whirring: Renaissance opened a door for him to appreciate the art of the ancient past. This noble way of life he thinks is an attack on the corruption of life now … David takes Renaissance space and makes it menacing. ibid.
Goya descends into the subterranean depths [of the soul]. Goya in the 1790s is the moment when the artist doesn’t just paint what he’s told, he also paints his imagination: the unasked for, the uncomfortable, the unwanted. ibid.
He is an art guru: John Ruskin. His life’s work is about the power of art to save our souls. Ruskin was a great battling critical mind. He taught Victorians to see clear, and through that to understand what they could be, they were better than themselves. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation III
The redeeming power of art. Art is not just a distraction from the gruelling trip of life, it is life. ibid.
Ruskin is the prophet of why art matters. ibid.
The man who fires up Ruskin to become the guru of the age is the great landscape painter J M W Turner. Turner paints nature … the emotion of that experience. ibid.
Ruskin is the guy who comes up with the idea of a bad Renaissance instead of a good one. ibid.
Pre-Raphaelites: These artists present Ruskin’s revolutionary social ideas in the form of metaphors – nature is the main one … The Pre-Raphaelites all read Ruskin’s books and adored the idea that reality is changing in ways that seem inhumane. ibid.