Art Politics Quotes

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics.

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.

The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

There is no gap between art and politics.

History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

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

The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics

Art should not be a tool of politics, but sometimes art can help make the political climate more open and help society become more free.

Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.

I came from an intellectual Parisian family. My father was a watchmaker; my mother was a housewife. We discussed politics, art, sculpture - never fashion.

The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.

Artists have really never had any representation on Capitol Hill, because it's not the nature of the artist to join together and make a unified presence. Those days kind of died in the '60s.

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

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

I've never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn't interest me.

Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest.