Tibor Kalman Quotes

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

Artists who take on curatorial activities have the advantage of negating the professional hurdles and limitations comprising institutions.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.

For me, what's a more important question is how we get at least the option of more diverse experiences in this media.

Point-blank, there is not enough diversity in media.

There's so much diversity on TV. It's actually reflecting American culture.

A lot of the time, because we don't have many Latinx scenarios on the landscape, not just in television or film and other media, we haven't gotten the chance to tell our story from our point of view.

I've always been political but I don't like to bring it into my work any more because I think it limits me.

Growing, up I didn't really have anyone to look up to. There weren't a lot of Mexicans on T.V. except for those in boxing.

I don't get why radio shows allow artists to do shows without creative control, without any art direction at all. Instead of that, I get their press guys, their camera guys to be my backdrop of my show.

I wanted a label that reflects the times... a center for artists who want to express themselves. That's what makes Interscope unique. It's about freedom.

I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.

There's something about the authenticity that Hollywood is missing when it comes to urban culture.

I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it's a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.

It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.

I want studios to be financing director-driven, auteurist cinema, as they did in the '70s. I think it's starting to happen now. Plus, because of how our world has changed politically, I think audiences are demanding more realism. We need to have more stuff in our culture about what is really going on right now.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.