Democratic Art Quotes

I'm interested in making art that is available to everybody.

Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.

I suggest that the great art belongs to all people, all the time--that indeed it is made for the people, by the people, to the people.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

Music should never be a dictatorship. It should be a symbiotic relationship between the musician and the audience.

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium.

. . . rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.

I'm not making music for intelligent people or dumb people. I'm just making music for people.

I don't make a particular distinction between 'high art' and 'low art.' Music is there for everybody. It's a river we can all put our cups into and drink it and be sustained by it.

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

When I got to filmmaking, the most democratic of environments where anybody could say anything, those were the best environments, but what you don't want to assume is that you know what the audience is thinking.

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.

Films should be for everybody.

I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do. I didn't think I was going to create any great masterpieces like Rembrandt or Gauguin. I thought comics was a common form of art, and strictly American in my estimation, because America was the home of the common man - and show me the common man that can't do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper.

The end goal is to make a piece that everybody has ownership over and everybody's proud of because everybody contributed to it. I think there's a communist, socialist vibe to 'Portlandia' to make it work.

I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.

I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing.

Mozart composed his music not for the elite, but for everybody.

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

Artists should agitate and democratize their own work, but they should also work to democratize the arts themselves.

Music is contagious and everywhere and democratic, and that's what drew me in. I was interested in acting and being a director, but one of the things that bored me about theatre was that it was not accessible to everyone.