Quotes About Political Art

#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. Judo should be free as art and science from any external influences, political, national, racial, and financial or any other organized interest. And all things connected with it should be directed to its ultimate object, the benefit of Humanity

Kano Jigoro

#24. 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

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

Barbara Kingsolver

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

Gustave Le Bon

#38. 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

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

Jo M. Sekimonyo

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

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law11 alone and not by nature.

Aristotle.

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media.

Ramachandra Guha

#48. 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

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

Peter Schjeldahl

#50. 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

#51. America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the "broad, sun-lit uplands."

Jon Meacham

#52. To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

Louise Erdrich

#53. 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

#54. Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate.

Hans Haacke

#55. And though the philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.

David Hume

#56. I love books, I love art, I'm a fanatic nature and wildlife person. People assume I'm a political animal, power hungry, wanting to run for office. And anyone who knows me knows that none of that's true.

David Mixner

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

Thom Mayne

#58. I believe in the power of great art to transcend geographical boundaries, political differences and even the restrictions of time.

Armand Hammer

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

Walter Pater

#60. In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political.

Jill Soloway

#61. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#62. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs

George Orwell

#63. Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Brad Holland

#64. In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.

Mao Zedong

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Sol LeWitt

#68. This document and scores similar to it were at the foundation of cultural, political and social change throughout the ages. Secret brotherhoods with one credo: to know, to dare, to be silent.

Art Johnson

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

Tina Brown

#70. The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

Scilla Elworthy

#71. As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?

Erica Jong

#72. 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

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

William C. Brown

#74. 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

#75. Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.

Joe Haldeman

#76. I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

Carrie Brownstein

#77. Midas, they say, possessed the art of old; Of turning whatsoe'er he touch'd to gold; This modern statesmen can reverse with ease - Touch them with gold, they'll turn to what you please.

John Wolcot

#78. 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

#79. The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Robert A. M. Stern

#80. The real art of governing consists, so far as possible, in doing nothing.

Laozi

#81. 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

#82. Political events are part of everyday life [in Colombia], so art and politics came to me as a natural thing, something that has been very much present in my life from the start.

Doris Salcedo

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

Jimmy Carter

#84. Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems.

Art Hoppe

#85. I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

Sheila Heti

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

Otto Von Bismarck

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. I'm an art major. You're a political science major. YOU go lay down the law.

C.K. Walker

#90. I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

Carrie Mae Weems

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. I made the decision that my contribution needed to be more musical than political. My music was enough, politically. Art matters. Art was enough. My music was enough to say what I had to say.

Kathleen Hanna

#96. There's a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.

Alan Moore

#97. Women's art, political art - those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.

Barbara Kruger

#98. 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

#99. If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?.

Elizabeth Prettejohn

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

Dave Hickey