Jean-Marc Vallee Quotes

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.

Hollywood likes to boast that it can elevate the national conscience.

Art matters.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

But, you see, the theatre is not always art in America.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

I don't buy into this idea that pop has to be frivolous or vacuous, and we've never subscribed to that.

I have been skeptical, sometimes, about the importance of rap music, which I think is a capitalistic project to make money.

I'm happy Lootera has sparked off a discussion.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.

Most people think I do street art, so I do everything for nothing. I'm an urchin who paints walls and does work for nothing. That's the first misconception about street artists, that we just paint for nothing.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I think the most important thing for the public and the press is to just listen to what Donald Trump says and follow up and ask questions about what appear to be either contradictory or uninformed or outright wacky ideas.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.