Politics And Art Quotes

I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock.

I had to make a movie about politics sometime in my career and it was impossible to do it seriously.

It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.

I seem to be the only Western playwright not personally acquainted with the new President of Czechoslovakia [Vaclav Havel]. I envy him though. What a relief to find oneself head of state and not have to write plays but just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of uncompleted dissident plays. To put them on now would be somehow inappropriate. Still, he could write a play about it.

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.

It's a very scary time for a lot of people; they feel scared to speak up. There's so much controversy even speaking up about politics to begin with. People try to discredit you at every single corner, especially if you're a woman. So it's hard as an artist to really speak up about this kind of stuff when you're trying to be successful and have a career.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

All literature is political.

I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

A lot of times, politics, global issues are very black and white. There is a place for that, but it's also fantastic to have art side by side, from different viewpoints, open for interpretations.

We need a president who realizes that there's no government business in show business.

The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

You can't talk about life without talking about politics. You have to have both. If you're just a political person, you're going to burn out. If you, as an artist, are just focused inward, you're going to eventually be irrelevant.

In 2003, I wrote a New York Times best-seller called 'Shut Up & Sing,' in which I criticized celebrities like the Dixie Chicks & Barbra Streisand who were trashing then-President George W. Bush. I have used a variation of that title for more than 15 years to respond to performers who sound off on politics.

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.

Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

Everything is art. Everything is politics.

The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.

Donald Trump's not politically correct. Although you are running for president, you should be politically correct. But there is also the expression of an artist.

Senator Helms might very well do that. I would point out to him that we in the art world are not necessarily in the business of making controversial art.

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.