Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.

There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

I don't want to paint rainbows: I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority.

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

While designed to visually seduce, Dune is not primarily a formal exercise but a social, ecological, cultural one.

My first black-on-black picture was 'The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.' I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony - all of that.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

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.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.

The arts are what humanize science and history.

I believe films are the mirror of society we live in.

I like to make broader strokes with politics in my work.

I think artists throughout the history of time have always been controversial and have been a voice to speak to public culture in a way that a politician can't because they'll lose their constituency.

What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.

'A Talk to Teachers' is emblematic of Baldwin's proclivity for candor over political appeasement and, like much of his work, focusses on history and the American consciousness.

Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.