Milan Kundera Quotes

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

In a popular medium, you're going to get loads of stuff that is trite, but there'll also be some really special moments.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

I believe that true art is universal in its appeal.

I always wanted the films to play in malls, and I wanted as many people as possible to see them. I never want them to be marginalized in the kind of rarefied, elitist world. I always have hopes that the films will permeate culture in a big way. A lot of times, I'm wrong, but it's always the hope.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.

At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.

The gallery is generating work for the masses.

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.

I want to put out music that everyday people can relate to.

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

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

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.

The mainstream consumed our culture.

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

It's hard to say what iconically will hit, resonate and stay with people.

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?