All Art Is Political Quotes

#1. I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.

Claes Oldenburg

#2. Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

Alfred De Vigny

#3. I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

Dave Hickey

#4. It is difficult to make political art work.

Thom Yorke

#5. Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

Ingmar Bergman

#6. Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

Stephen Davis

#7. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.

Amiri Baraka

#8. Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.

Youssou N'Dour

#9. Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant.

Henri Queuille

#10. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Chris Campanioni

#11. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Vivian Gornick

#12. I know thy works, that thou are neither cold nor hot; I would that thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

Rosa Luxemburg

#13. The politician is ... trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

Edward R. Murrow

#14. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

#15. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.

Michael Heizer

#16. Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Aldous Huxley

#17. Politics is the art of achieving political goals - of achieving what is possible in a given situation - that is, in a situation that has its conditions and its limits.

Adam Michnik

#18. Political consultants are pugilists, masters in the dark art of negativity. Which is why it's surprising to hear Democrats such as Steve McMahon and Republicans like Rich Galen urging their presidential candidates to be more, well, positive.

Ron Fournier

#19. Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces.

Raheel Farooq

#20. A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

Rachel Kushner

#21. Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.

Lewis Hyde

#22. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

William Kentridge

#23. There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.

Blaise Pascal

#24. I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Barbara Kingsolver

#25. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

Abdourahman A. Waberi

#26. My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.

Roselee Goldberg

#27. What do you think an artist is? ... he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Pablo Picasso

#28. In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

Michael Leunig

#29. One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.

Thom Yorke

#30. In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.

Hans Haacke

#31. My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

Jack Bowman

#32. There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

Chris Jordan

#33. History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#34. There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.

Joe Wright

#35. WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity.

Ambrose Bierce

#36. The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.

Gustave Le Bon

#37. What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

Salman Rushdie

#38. any form of expression that ceases to be an experience and becomes an art form loses its glowing divinity

Jo M. Sekimonyo

#39. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#40. I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Mohsin Hamid

#41. Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.

Ryszard Legutko

#42. Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk.

Brian Sewell

#43. All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

Chloe Thurlow

#44. All art is political, all art is a martial one.

William C. Brown

#45. At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze.

Jennifer Birkett

#46. Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.

Philipp Meyer

#47. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

August Wilson

#48. In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political
especially that which pretends not to be.

Edward Abbey

#49. Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it's hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence.

Nick Paumgarten

#50. But artistically, my art I kept very separate from my political beliefs, deliberately and very, very rarely would I allow that kind of thing into it.

Robert Barry