Toyah Willcox Quotes

The Rockwell magazine cover was more a part of the American reality than a record of it.

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

Marilyn Manson is a mockery of American pop culture.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

Isn't it in the nature of intellectuals to be culture critics?

They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

I don't think Hollywood per se is supposed to be taken seriously, otherwise, dear Lord, that would be frightening.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

We may not like our times or many aspects of the time we live in but that is not the fault of art as such.

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

We're so busy broadcasting our latest cultural disdain that we scantly notice anything we enjoy. 'Oh man, this Rebecca Black kid is terrible! Let's laugh at her!' has become more culturally relevant than, 'I really love this new Bilal record.'

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture, and it's been very well published in the U.K.

When I say 'hip-hop is dead,' basically, America is dead. There is no political voice. Music is dead.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.