"Painting is a primary activity, somewhere between whistling and scratching. It's an extremely efficacious and enduring method of communicating simple as well as complex ideas. For me, it's also a means of expressing love of life and love of creation. And, given that humans inhabit interiors with walls, paintings still function extraordinarily well," Verne Dawson (painter).
"Contemporary painting is no longer in a position to do what nineteenth-century painting did, namely, to make statements about the world. All the self-reflexive and self-destructive avant-garde movements have resulted in painting being obsessed with its own "thingness," materiality, and structures, to the extent that it can no longer depict the world," Boris Groys (critic).
"Painting is in a muddle. No handy monikers dominate conversation as "neo-expressionism" and neo-geo" once did... Painters seem to lack a discourse," Robert Storr (painting enthusiast).
"I'd given up painting in 1965 for the rather crude reason that it was an outmoded technology... There were enough paintings and sculptures silting up basements of museums all over the world - why produce more? It was ecologically unsound; a form of pollution. We didn't need more pigment on canvas, or bronze, or welded steel tubing, that no-one knew what to do with except keep in some store-room," Victor Burgin (conceptual artist).
"In the last several decades modern art has been degraded into ornament... American abstract art is a lie, a shame, a cover-up for a poverty of the spirit. A mask to hide the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be. Unwilling to show this badness, this rawness. It is laughable, this lie. Anything but this! What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don't! Let it show! It is an escape from the true feelings about the world - and us in it. In America.
Where are the wooden floors - the light bulbs - the cigarette smoke? Where are the brick walls? Where is what we feel - without notions - ideas - food intensions? No, just conform to the banks - the plaza - monuments to the people who own this country - give everyone the soothing lullaby of 'art'. We all know what this is - don't we?" Philip Guston (artist).
"Painting matters because it represents our own body and the world outside. It is a key metaphor for how we make the world as somewhere we belong," Tony Godfrey (author).
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