NEWSHelnwein

Modernism's newest publication explores several dozen works of surprising modern and contemporary art. Encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, it features artists ranging from Francis Picabia and Hannah Hoch to Tony Oursler, Gottfried Helnwein and Peter Shire to R. Crumb and the Philadelphia Wireman and more.

Die grossen Katastrophen der Menschheitsgeschichte sind immer durch Gehorsam und Konformität entstanden, nicht durch Freiheit und Individualität. Ich glaube, die Gesellschaft würde mit wenigen Regeln und Einschränkungen viel besser funktionieren. Vor allem sollte es ein uneingeschränktes Recht auf freie Meinungsäusserung geben. Vielleicht gäbe es dann mehr Kreative und Künstler und weniger Soldaten.

Any belief system will pre-condition you to see only things that you are supposed to see, but it will make you blind to anything you are not allowed to perceive, even if it happens right in front of you. Through various education systems in all history, people have been convinced to abandon their own values and dreams and have been programmed to think and behave in certain ways. So people have developed a good workable system of selective perception. But there are always those that can’t be broken and properly programmed: artists, writers and thinkers. Nothing scares authoritarian regimes more than art and free creation. Why would Hitler burn mountains of books and paintings and ban all arts? Why would Stalin—the master over life and death of almost 300 million people, a man who commanded the biggest army and secret service that ever existed—be afraid of a poem by Anna Akhmatova? Why would Mao be so obsessed with destroying China’s entire cultural heritage? Why would FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, while denying the existence of organised crime in the US, put so much effort into harassing and spying on every artist from Hemingway, Elvis, Thomas Mann to John Lennon? The last thing any human society wants are free beings. Don’t wait for somebody to grant you freedom, it will never happen; if you want freedom, you have to seize it. Creating art is one way of doing it, and for me it’s the most effective way. On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist. It means striking back.