Elijah Wood Quotes

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

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.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

How can art make a difference in the world?

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.

All art is political. Yes. Even the stuff that sounds like bubble-gum songs. I think all art is, by nature, intended to motivate society for change, and the only reason change doesn't happen is because within the target population, courage is lacking.

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of "a politically engaged university," for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).

I do believe that painting can change the world.

I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom

You can positively affect and change a social circumstance with art, and it’s vital that a change happens now.

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.

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

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can.

I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

Use your art to fight.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

I had just finished reading The Day of the Locust when this piece was brought to my attention, and I was like, "How do you create art in the system, the way it is?" Looking around the studio film landscape, there are all of these great superhero movies, which is fantastic, especially for my kids, but it's hard to find real art house films in the studio system, these days.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

In a position to make a difference, politicians and hypocrites they don't wanna listen.

I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

There was no special event that made me decide. I had collected some photos and the idea was in the back of my mind for a long time. It was growing and growing, so finally I said, 'I must paint this.' I come from East Germany and am not a Marxist, so of course at the time I had no sympathy for the ideas, or for the ideology that these people represented. I couldn't understand, but I was still impressed. Like everyone, I was touched. It was an exceptional moment for Germany.