Norman Mailer Quotes

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.

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.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

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.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.

I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through.

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

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

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

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.

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

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

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.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

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.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

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

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.

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.