Rachel Kushner Quotes

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief moment, they were arguably the most influential aesthetic provocateurs in the world.

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.

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.

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.

No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

At times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for … movements to arise to replace lost hopes by idle dreams: dreams of a savior who will lead us from bondage …. Some may yearn for a lost golden age, or succumb to the blandishments of the new Messiahs who come to the fore at such moments.

The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.

Vertigo's always been a label that experiments with new stuff and forms of subversion.

It's never a good sign when extremism becomes the norm.

I remember being in Washington for high school when the city was on fire and those were troubling times, the Vietnam War, the protests.

America cannot function if we are a society fueled by riots.

Even Andy Warhol had a copy of '666.'

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

Antifa are the left-wing version of Nazis. They are very violent; they are terrible people. They cause a ruckus and property damage.

I was 14 when the Democratic convention in my hometown of Chicago erupted into violence. It was a tough year.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

This is what the establishment is scared of: Of joy, the sense of humour, of irony.

You cannot appease fascism by meeting it in the middle; you cannot beat racism by indulging or excusing it.

I thought the 60s in London was normal, so when it stopped it was a shock.

Islamic extremism is the prime enemy of civil society and social peace, both in Italy and in Israel.

Any time people are breaking outside the norm and playing something that isn't expected - that feels like punk to me.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.