The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting. Ezra Pound
The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work. Harold Rosenberg
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. Jackson Pollock
After sticking up the picture I took five minutes to watch what happened next. A sea of people walked up, stared and left looking confused and slightly cheated. I felt like a true modern artist. Banksy
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal. Piet Mondrian
The function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths. Eric Kandel