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“cu noi timpul tace lung
ca un câine mort
după luna desenată
de un copil cuminte
pe asfalt.”
― Monica Laura Rapeanu, Orbul de la Cină

“cineva cânta și era singur.
pentru noi te scriai
cu litere mici
să nu știm.

din asprimile sângelui
din nopțile vulturilor
începuse muzica aceea
pe care n-am auzit-o.

strugurii-și strigă
vinul,
străinul (...)”
― Monica Laura Rapeanu, Orbul de la Cină

“iti aduc pe brate
puiul d tigru
cu colti tristi, intorsi.
luna rade singura
uitata pe-un horn.
cateodata cainii
au stele
pe cerul gurii.”
― Monica Laura Rapeanu, Orbul de la Cină

“The one area that Winkleman avoided was dealing in contemporary art, which Memling described as "shooting poisonous snakes with a water pistol.”
― Hannah Mary Rothschild, The Improbability of Love

“We live in an age where photography rains on us like sewage from above.”
― Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery

“Kelly wears her hair swept back in an odd 1940s pompadour that one writer assumed must be her “auxiliary brain.”
― Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World

“Buying is an extremely satisfying, macho act”
― Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World

“Contemporary art, like contemporary literature, theater, music, everything, is almost always completely atrocious.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Oh, contemporary art, contemporary everything�� Always giving credit where credit’s due.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“По большей части современное искусство лишено политического подтекста, разве что иногда случаются странные акции, больше напоминающие попытки вскочить на подножку уходящего поезда. В целом, даже когда художники-авангардисты нашего поколения выступают с агрессивными и вызывающими работами, в их творениях чаще видна нахальная усмешка, а не злобный оскал. Все-таки авторы больше склонны развлекать, а не устраивать кампании. Тектонические сдвиги в обществе, произошедшие за последние двадцать пять лет, не попали в круг их внимания. Эпоха торжествующего капитализма, когда превыше всего ценятся слава и богатство, прокомментирована была в общем-то слабо, а уж влияние глобализации и цифровых средств массовой информации и подавно не нашло отражения. Что же до проблем охраны окружающей среды, коррупции на разных уровнях, терроризма, религиозного фундаментализма, упадка сельской жизни, угрожающего расслоения в обществе, когда богатые становятся все богаче, а бедные �� все беднее, жадности и бессердечности банкиров�� Ну, всего этого как будто и нет, если судить по экспозициям в музеях современного искусства.”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell

“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art.
That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn.
No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction.
No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology.
And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“With the academic background that I had, I found that I was able to stretch my imagination and stretch my exploration beyond what I thought I was capable of, which was really fascinating to me, and very fulfilling.”
― James Stanford

“When I first started showing the “Indra’s Jewels�� work, I had people coming out of the woodwork saying “Who is this guy? What is he doing? Who does he think he is doing this stuff?�� and the more they’d find out they’d go “Oh, he was a painter? He taught for more than decade on the university level? He knows what he’s talking about? Oh, well let’s look at it a little closer.”
― James Stanford, Indra's Jewels

“The main criticism was really “he just presses a filter and gets these images.�� But then they’d realize that I had learned how to paint and how to draw—that I had paid my dues, and I’d also been a graphic artist and a technical illustrator. And so I was able to show that I could draw with technical pens—and do anything that anyone else could do—and yet still was fascinated by this, and that sort of opened people up a little bit more. The more they knew about me, the more open they were to my explorations in the digital field.”
― James Stanford

“Sometimes knowing what to shoot is a big relief. Other times, being extemporaneous is the way to go. I love to go out and see what the universe is presenting to me on any given day. Learning to be sensitive to what is out there with no preconceived idea is a wonderful way to discover new subject matter. But only looking for the shot that presents itself in the moment seldom creates new technical skills.

In order to master the camera, I give myself special assignments. Giving yourself an assignment helps you to learn about photography and your equipment. By knowing what you want to achieve, you can plan things out. This way you can slow things down. Shoot and confirm. Take notes. Concentrate on getting the shot just right! You will learn to master Aperture Priority, shutter speed, ISO, manual settings, and more. Digital Camera, 2018”
― James Stanford

“The Mojave Desert is a harsh, but very spiritual, place. It’s as much a matrix as anything else in my life has been. Growing up in the desert has a different gestalt than growing up in a temperate zone, with its humidity and rainfall. As children growing up in the Mojave, we chased lizards and snakes, instead of frogs and squirrels. There is an arid openness about it, and a true feeling of being alone, that you don’t get in any other type of environment.”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“It has occurred to me that when one is raised in the absence of culture �� without access to galleries and museums �� one has to fill the void. I turned to books, album covers, magazines, slides and prints �� anything visually stimulating that I could lay my hands on.”
― James Stanford

“The temptation is always to think of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca, the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World��. Well, it’s that. But, it’s a lot more than that as well. There are beautiful natural rock formations, rare plants and animals, and even pseudo-alpine regions. Just because you can see for a hundred miles doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there to see, and open desert allows you to see things in a different way. There is nothing to block your view, and nothing to hide behind.”
― James Stanford

“I developed a thirst for great art, but it wasn’t until I was 20 that I finally visited my first museum, the Prado in Madrid. There, in 1968, my interest was caught by the paintings of Luis de Morales, a 16th-century artist from the harsh Extremadura region of Spain.

Morales was a Mannerist, like El Greco or Parmigianino, who painted very graceful figures with long necks and limbs. He did a magnificently smooth sfumato modelling. But the effect that impressed me the most was a fine line that he applied around all of his figures. He didn’t need those illustrative lines, but they really made his figures ‘pop�� off the background.”
― James Stanford

“Living in the desert makes a lot of things very clear. It really gives you an unobstructed view. The severity
of the landscape opens people up to their inner selves. St. Anthony went into the wilderness and was tormented by demons. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. In an unexpected way, the Mojave is a very spiritual place.”
― James Stanford

“Living in the desert makes a lot of things very clear. It really gives you an unobstructed view. The severity of the landscape opens people up to their inner selves. St. Anthony went into the wilderness and was tormented by demons. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. In an unexpected way, the Mojave is a very spiritual place.”
― James Stanford

“The gestalt of living in the desert, surrounded by the desert, was a big influence in my life and in the lives of other artists in this community. There are many artists and musicians who grew up as lonely kids in the desert with nothing to do, and who chose to channel their focus inward. In the Mojave Desert, numinous, mystical experiences are not as rare as one might think. The numinous is a part of the whole artistic experience for the desert artist.”
― James Stanford

“While I began my career as a painter in the early 1980s, I became increasingly curious about the possibilities promised by digital tools - so I switched my traditional media for computer equipment. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“At first, I thought I would use photography and the collage and montage possibilities of Photoshop strictly for visualization in preparation for my paintings. But after I experimented with Photoshop and digital photography, I soon discovered new possibilities and found exciting new ways of presenting ideas. I soon found that I was more interested in pure image-making than I was in actually painting the images. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“Technology also made some of the established principles of image-making meaningless, such as the idea that symmetrical images are more static and perhaps less interesting than asymmetrical images. Symmetry is easier to achieve with mechanical means, so I used my collection of digital tools to break the rules, explore perfect symmetry and create repeatable patterns. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford

“When I take a picture of a derelict sign, I already begin to see and find the patterns and shapes that will form the final piece. Once I get the image in the studio, I begin to layer the patterns created, making sure to save the patterns I particularly like. I never lose a layer of work during this process; I simply continue to build and modify those patterns that appeal to me. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford, Indra's Jewels

“The germ containing an inverted reflection of contemporary art and Christianity is discernible in the historical conflation of the good and the beautiful. Though it is nowadays evident that what is good is not always beautiful and vice versa—a distinction perhaps best illustrated in Christian art by the contrast between depictions of Christ, scourged and gruesome, with depictions of Lucifer, radiant and alluring—the notion still lingers. Even nowadays, it is tempting when faced with such contrasting images to revert: to instinctually reimagine Christ in shining brilliance and Lucifer in gory horror. But this stems from a fundamentally pagan impulse: to search for Christ in the guise of a hastily baptized Apollo is to bend to the charm of the very contradiction which Christianity itself reconciles.”
― Michael Shindler

“The worm that devours the parasite that enables it to digest, and dies of it. The crustacean that wanders beneath the sea until it finds a fixed point. Once secured to that spot, it devours its own brain, which is now useless since it served it only to find this landing place. In this same way, we devour the Nothing that enables us to digest the world, and without which we cannot survive. But we cannot prevent ourselves from doing so - just as the scorpion cannot prevent itself from killing the frog that gets it across the river.

Heavenly bodies are irresponsible - who would hold it against them? Ultimate responsibility is light years away.

Contemporary art summed up by a London taxi driver outside Tate Modern: 'When you go in, you understand why it's free.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Anamodernism insists on a polyvalent synthesis of -isms, more precisely in their introduction into a system of values, which as elements can be used and revalidated.”
― Vladan Kuzmanovic

“Zeitgenössische Kunst zu betrachten und zu verstehen ist eine andere Disziplin, und die Abhängigkeit vom Kunstmarkt ist hier weitaus entscheidender als bei der Alten Kunst.”
― Konrad O. Bernheimer, Gebrauchsanweisung fürs Museum