Art In Society Quotes

#1. The role of art in society differs for every artist.

Maya Lin

#2. Art, in the sense of fine art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcendence are no longer available for many people, particularly the educated.

George Parkin Grant

#3. You were bred for humanity and sold to society. One day you'll wake up in the present day, a million generations removed from the expectations of being who you really want to be.

Jethro Tull

#4. The arts reflect profoundly the most democratic credo, the belief in an individual vision or voice ... The arts' belief in potential gives each of us
both audience and creator
pride in our society's ability to nurture individuals.

Wendy Wasserstein

#5. In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.

Edward Gibbon

#6. Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.

Virginia Postrel

#7. Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

Edward Burnett Tylor

#8. What a society deems important is enshrined in its art

Harry S. Broudy

#9. To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

Jacob Bronowski

#10. Our Government is pleased to partner with the Kelowna Visual and Performing Arts Centre Society, located in the heart of British Columbia's vibrant Central Okanagan region. Support for the performing arts is essential for the professional growth and development of our Canadian artists.

Shelly Glover

#11. Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.

Susan Sontag

#12. There's a radical change in the relationship with the human being and society. Art now is an open conversation with the society. Previously there was a necessity for a little bit of screaming and shouting just to get it into the conversation.

Lawrence Weiner

#13. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#14. Society is indeed a contract ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

Edmund Burke

#15. Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it.

John Kinsella

#16. The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

Greg Forster

#17. Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

Jacob Bronowski

#18. Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

Huston Smith

#19. There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

John Boorman

#20. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society.

Herbert Read

#21. We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.

Ai Weiwei

#22. Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.

Brad Holland

#23. Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.

David Hume

#24. Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.

Ruadhan J. McElroy

#25. As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Adrienne Rich

#26. If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.

Erica Jong

#27. Men, not only in Turkish society but everywhere, have been the bosses in terms of creation. If you look at art history, women were the objects. The fact that it's not been made by women means that the subjects are not women.

Deniz Gamze Erguven

#28. There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

Al Jourgensen

#29. Because there's such a long tradition of the arts being very prominent and very varied in Cuban culture and society, people do use the art world as a space for critical reflection and people look to it for that.

Rachael Price

#30. In free society art is not a weapon ... Artists are not engineers of the soul.

John F. Kennedy

#31. Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation

Angela Y. Davis

#32. Destruction is as valid an artistic statement as construction. Both statements echo the model of the society we live in. The only invalid art is utopian

Dean Cavanagh

#33. I'm a Sufi Muslim, I would say. I believe in using the medium to create a good vibration because art is so important to society. Some projects I don't do because I feel that it's going to create a bad vibe. I don't do propaganda films that are anti another religion, anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu.

A.R. Rahman

#34. [On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.

Riane Eisler

#35. I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

Roy Lichtenstein

#36. Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.

Harry Belafonte

#37. Better rooms better furniture, better objects d'art can only be created for a society interested in living - not existing.

Van Day Truex

#38. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .

George Santayana

#39. In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.

Nick Hanauer

#40. I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?

Terry Tempest Williams

#41. I am a very, very strong advocate of the notion that we shouldn't equate the arts with other aspects of infrastructure. They have a unique role in any civilised society and that requires appropriate and targeted government support.

George Brandis

#42. Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

Louis Faurer

#43. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

Al Alvarez

#44. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

Ai Weiwei

#45. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

Julian Barnes

#46. By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.

Robert Wilson

#47. Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.

Angela Davis

#48. It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

H.L. Mencken

#49. Art has often been and continues to be considered transcendent. I see this as misguided and, in fact, a way of subverting the powerful voice art can be in global discussions about politics, economics, society, culture, religion and international relations.

Aman Mojadidi

#50. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

#51. In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

Katherine Anne Porter

#52. Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.

Raymond Salvatore Harmon

#53. 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

#54. In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Ernst Fischer

#55. In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.

Ellen Dissanayake

#56. All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

Roman Payne

#57. ...Michelangelo transformed both the practice of art and our conception of the artist's role in society.

Miles J. Unger

#58. I've always been a bit of a mix between art and technology. I used to paint a lot, but I'm not very good with my hands. It has always been a fusion between my computer gaming interests and being exposed to the rich data of society that we live in.

Aaron Koblin

#59. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.

Brice Marden

#60. When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

John Trudell

#61. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#62. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

Aldous Huxley

#63. If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money.

Robert Crumb

#64. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.

Slawomir Mrozek

#65. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

Alfred North Whitehead

#66. How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.

Kermit The Frog

#67. Asked what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, 'The same role as a good shoe, nothing more.

Georg Baselitz

#68. Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.

Sebastian Junger

#69. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#70. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#71. Regardless of the importance of known evidence to the contrary, the arts are generally regarded as being so much entertaining fluff, a commodity that isn't a priority in the traditional program of learning. This is unacceptable in a so-called 'enlightened' society.

Ken Danby

#72. Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

Edward Bond

#73. Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

#74. Being and having in our society teaches us how to take possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting go. For there is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.

Gabriel Marcel

#75. I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society.

Jeanette Winterson

#76. Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called artist's world.

Muse

#77. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

Dana Gioia

#78. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

Adrienne Rich

#79. In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

Edward St. Aubyn

#80. A fine remedy for our anxieties over our low status in society may be to travel - whether literally or figuratively, by viewing works of art - through the gigantic spaces of the world.

Alain De Botton

#81. The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.

Nicolas Chamfort

#82. The art of friendship has been little cultivated in our society.

Robert J. Havighurst

#83. If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings.

Thomas Sowell

#84. Art is an imagination, projection, and reflection of the mind in a particular form that society can internalize and enjoy.

Debasish Mridha

#85. By 1833 the largest publisher in America, Harper and Company, boasted one horse-powered printing press and seven hand presses while the American Bible Society owned 16 new state-of-the-art, steam-driven presses and 20 hand presses.

Phil Cooke

#86. Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Victor Hugo

#87. Everything in life is drawing, if you want. Drawing is quintessential to knowing the self. Art that survives from one generation to the next is the art that actually carries something that tells society about self.

Richard Tuttle

#88. The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Thom Mayne

#89. By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

Lascelles Abercrombie

#90. If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

Jeanette Winterson

#91. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.

Kurt Cobain

#92. Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai