Robert Hughes Quotes

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.

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.

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.

Everything Brecht wrote—plays, dialogues, and poetry—was his attempt to clarify the inner contradictions not only of the capitalism and fascism of his times, but also of the communism that was always disappointing his deepest hopes. In a book that makes Brecht’s struggle to reveal these hidden contradictions its central theme, Glahn issues, by implication, a call to arms to today’s artists—who are faced with a world that seems to defy attempts to treat the global crisis with an art that is rarely more than notes on ‘local’ angst.

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

The best art is either political or revolutionary....Those things that are powerfully revolutionary are not always successful in the market place.

My role as an artist is not to make changes [in society] but to inspire changes.

If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

People like Dick Gregory, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone show me what the definition of an artist is - it isn't just to make art but to speak truth to what's happening, speak beauty into the world, speak love into the world and also... get involved.

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.

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

I feel like art has been at the center of change since the beginning of time.

I think we're at a really critical time in terms of art, and I think it's totally possible to have a project that is entertaining but also moving the cultural needle forward. I think it's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to work on 'Billions.'

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

All art is political. Yes. Even the stuff that sounds like bubble-gum songs. I think all art is, by nature, intended to motivate society for change, and the only reason change doesn't happen is because within the target population, courage is lacking.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.

I do believe that painting can change the world.