Alexander Melamid: Quotes about art

Alexander Melamid is Russian artist. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Alexander Melamid: 8 quotes0 likes

“There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people. Not only in art: in social thinking, in politics. That's one of the other things about this poll, one of the attempts to get out of this, by some maybe funny means — humor helps — because we really don't know where to go. and what our next step has to be.
Artists now.”

Alexander Melamid

Vitaly Komar, ‎Aleksandr Melamid, ‎JoAnn Wypijewski (1997). Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art p. 16

“… There's a machine which is called History of Art, which is a structure. And artist fits in this only because he or she is needed for this structure. If for example the History of Art needs some parallel lines, there is an individual who makes parallel lines. And this individual fits into this machine which works by itself; it doesn't care about people or anything else, it just goes by itself.”

Alexander Melamid

Quoted in: Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory, (2008) p. 67.
The search for a people's art: painting by the numbers, 1994

“No, the parallels are between modernism, late modernism, and socialist realism, of course. That's two sides of one coin. Both came of this idea of aristocrats, of people in power, imposing the culture on the people. A totally inhuman art. Modern art, and Pollock is the best example, is totally inhuman. Huge pictures for museums--now we call them museums; in Stalin times they were called palaces, but basically the same thing--which we rarely see and rarely visit. The sheer size of this painting, it's a totally inhuman scale. And there it can be typified…”

Alexander Melamid

The search for a people's art: painting by the numbers, 1994