Bell Hooks Quotes

I never start anything with a really overt, political, or even exactly artistic mission statement.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

Everything is art. Everything is politics.

There is no gap between art and politics.

In the largest sense, every work of art is protest... A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it... A hymn is a controversial song - sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out...

Some of the greatest artists did their best work when they got political.

A lot of artists say, I'm not political. People are afraid of this word.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

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

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

Art is art. Politics is politics. It's very hard to get them together.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

Any form of art is political if you make it that way.

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.