Daily Inspiration Quote by Guillaume Apollinaire

There is a provocateur's snap in Apollinaire's "I hate": not a genteel critique but a deliberate slap meant to wake artists from the romance of timelessness. Coming from a writer who helped name and midwife modernism (and who moved easily among Cubists, poets, and painters in prewar Paris), the line reads less like personal bitterness than like a manifesto in miniature. Its real target isn't "bad art" so much as evasive art.

"Not of their time" is a moral accusation disguised as an aesthetic one. It suggests the artist who hides in inherited styles, who raids the past for costumes, who treats history as a shelter rather than a material. In Apollinaire's world, that retreat was not neutral. The early 20th century was a laboratory of new technologies, new urban rhythms, new politics, and finally the cataclysm of World War I, which Apollinaire experienced directly. To pretend you could make art untouched by those pressures was, to him, a kind of cowardice: a refusal to register the temperature of the moment.

The phrase also carries a sly modernist arrogance. "Of their time" implies the artist as instrument and antenna, absorbing fracture, speed, dissonance, and turning it into form. It flatters the avant-garde as history's chosen translators and shames everyone else as anachronisms.

Yet the line is sharper than a simple demand for novelty. Apollinaire isn't asking for trend-chasing; he's asking for risk: the willingness to let the present deform your tastes, your techniques, even your sense of beauty. Art that won't be contemporaneous, he implies, won't be honest.