Aesthetic Rebellion Quotes

I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things.

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.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

My nighttime look is exactly like my daytime look - like I'm going to a super fancy funeral. I guess it would be considered extreme to most people, but I like it that way. The idea of conventional beauty isn't attractive to me... that's why, when I was growing up, I felt kind of torn about makeup.

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political.

The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

We're all trying so hard to be beautiful, but the people in 'Kuso' are trying so hard to be disgusting.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

It falls apart now. They used to be intrinsically linked. Now they've been driven so far apart that I don't think the one has anything to do with the other. Even more so: I think that there is almost a reaction against style, that brute ugliness somehow has been interpreted as being the way to go.

Ugly is attractive. Ugly is exciting.