Richard Phillips Quotes

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

How I can be an active voice for gay people but also the music industry? This is the art we need right now. This is what we need right now. We're in a renaissance, and we need people to rebel, come forth, and bring messages into art.

I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.

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.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.

Like the music and the period, I wanted 'I'm Not There' to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling and dangerous.

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism.

In earlier times there was one king and thousands of artists painting his palace. Now you’ve got thousands of artists painting for millions of people.

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.

If you look at the history of art and fashion, it's always been political. It's always been pushing boundaries.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

I try to vote as left as I can. I hope that my paintings will coincide and be far left, but frequently... the painting rebels and goes fascist on me.

Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.

I don't believe that there is a separation between art and political consciousness.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

I consider myself an 'actorvist.' When I say that, what I mean is that I use my art to inform my activism and to be my activism sometimes, but I also use my activism in my art.

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

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete... with Dada I also have in common a certain mistrust towards power. We don't like authority, we don't like power.

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.

I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom

Use your art to fight.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.