Artistic Rebellion Quotes

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

Rock 'n' roll is meant to entertain. Hippie folk singers are supposed to be singing about leftist views, but I don't think rock 'n' roll was ever that way. I don't remember the early rock 'n' rollers ever expressing any political views.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

My grandfather made films on God, I make it on the devil, so, I wonder what he would say if he was alive. He'd probably disown me.

When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

Painters are noted for being dissipated and wild.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

I will die for the art & what I believe in. The art ain't always gon' be polite.

An artist must smash down the systems that domesticate the mind.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

I like art. It's another way to rebel.

To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

All art is based on non-conformity.

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.