John Boorman Quotes

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities,...art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and...art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, 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. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

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.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

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

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

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

what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

What is the big deal about Eminem? Since when is offensive language a reason for being unpopular? I like the fact that Eminem is brash and angry and politically incorrect. At least he has an opinion. He's stirring things up. He's provoking a discussion. He's making people's blood boil. He's reflecting what's going on in society right now. That is what art is supposed to do.

I think that's my hope for a lot of the feminist movement is that the gender thing sort of stops being the selling point, if that makes any sense. We're just people making art, and that's how this process has felt to me.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

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

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.