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. It is difficult to make political art work.

Thom Yorke

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Youssou N'Dour

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

Henri Queuille

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Aldous Huxley

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Raheel Farooq

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

Rachel Kushner

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Ambrose Bierce

#25. 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

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

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

Mary Karr

#30. In other words, art is a realm entirely separated from the interests of real life-a refuge for detached and gifted souls from sordid political and economic struggles.

DeWitt Henry Parker

#31. The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.

Gerhard Richter

#32. My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

Peter Schjeldahl

#33. To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.

William Empson

#34. Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.

Allan Bloom

#35. Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

Thom Mayne

#36. Art is self-sufficient and need serve no moral or political purpose

Walter Pater

#37. The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Toni Morrison

#38. 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

#39. Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

Tina Brown

#40. In one sense it is evident that the art of kingship does include the art of lawmaking. But the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability.

Plato

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

William C. Brown

#42. 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

#43. I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

Aleksandar Hemon

#44. A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#45. Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Jimmy Carter

#46. Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best

Otto Von Bismarck

#47. Basically, art should remain something that is complex, that has many layers, so there's always a possibility to reconsider things and have a different perspective. It's not just an advertisement with one single message that has some authority, political or not.

Camille Henrot

#48. Whether statistics be an art or a science ... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.

Adolphe Quetelet

#49. 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

#50. My work is always a ready-made ... cultural, political, or social, and also it could be art - to make people re-look at what we have done, its original position, to create new possibilities.

Ai Weiwei

#51. What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.

Ian Svenonius

#52. People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?

Ai Weiwei

#53. No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

George Orwell

#54. Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

Dave Hickey

#55. I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.

Marina Abramovic

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

August Wilson

#57. My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art.

Thom Yorke

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

Edward Abbey

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Like art, political action gives shape and expression to the things we fear as well as to those we desire. It is a creative process, drawing on the power to imagine as well as to act.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#62. Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.

Steve Earle