Eugene Ionesco Quotes

All art is based on non-conformity.

How I can be an active voice for gay people but also the music industry? This is the art we need right now. This is what we need right now. We're in a renaissance, and we need people to rebel, come forth, and bring messages into art.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

The Pre-Raphaelites, while very bothered by what the establishment thought of them, also utterly rebelled against it. In everything - social, sexual, emotional - they were out on a limb, pushing the boundaries.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.

Today, somewhere in America, there's a kid who's got a laptop and a guitar and a couple of his friends he's putting together to play drums and bass, who's gonna change the way we say things, the way that we dress, the way we view things, the music we hear, everything.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Tonight I am going to defecate on stage because I think that is the only way to express the nature of my soul according to rock and roll.

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

I am a black new wave artist.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.

I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.

Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.