Art And Ideology Quotes & Sayings

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos. — Kenneth Tynan

It is important to note that the missional church combines the concern for community development normally characterized by the liberal churches and the desire for personal and community transformation normally characterized by the evangelical movement. This blurring of the old lines of demarcation between theologies, doctrine, and ideology within the church makes the way open for much more integrated mission to occur. It's like saying that we want to prepare like an evangelical; preach like a Pentecostal; pray like a mystic; do the spiritual disciplines like a Desert Father, art like a Catholic, and social justice like a liberal. — Michael Frost

We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before. — Idries Shah

Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask. — John Grant

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. — Yves Tanguy

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash. — Vladimir Nabokov

The issue is Kinkade's ideology, and particularly his nostalgia; his paintings endlessly trumpet a nonexistent past when times were simpler and morality more pure. There's nothing wrong with this, but it stands at odds with a contemporary art world that looks to the future for inspiration. We value complexity and innovation, and distrust saccharine pictures of the past. — Paddy Johnson

Beauty is the product of the dominant ideology. (Thus when ideology changes, the ideal body follows.) We can see that in the history of art. — Orlan

I like the ideology of there being no such thing as perfection. But I'm of the opinion that I have witnessed perfection at various times, especially in art. — Jack O'Connell

Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster. — Gerhard Richter

When we decided to go to Cuba to perform, we did it because we just wanted to build a bridge, you know, between Cuba and the rest of the community. And we just wanted to prove that music and art need to be over all ideology or way to think life, and we just wanted to go in there and play just because of love. — Juanes

I've seen nerdists make tributes to their obsessions out of Legos that are like works of art. It just goes to show you how pervasive this stuff has become in our culture. It really is an ideology that you can subscribe to now. — Chris Hardwick

Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired. — Hal Crowther

Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail ... — Gerhard Richter

As time went by we developed a sort of ideology without ever formulating it as such. I've always said that we are documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings we photograph originate directly from this purely economical thinking. — Bernd Becher

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation. — Theodore Dalrymple

But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative - the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory - it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we're to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. — Michael Copperman

I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory ... Therefore it's time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it's time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too..(1973 — Joseph Beuys

What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters. — Federico Fellini

There was no special event that made me decide. I had collected some photos and the idea was in the back of my mind for a long time. It was growing and growing, so finally I said, 'I must paint this.' I come from East Germany and am not a Marxist, so of course at the time I had no sympathy for the ideas, or for the ideology that these people represented. I couldn't understand, but I was still impressed. Like everyone, I was touched. It was an exceptional moment for Germany. — Gerhard Richter

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be. — Steven Soderbergh

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. — Toni Morrison

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection. — Alain Badiou

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. — T.J. Clark

It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music. — Kim Gordon

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies - one might almost say, two personalities of the individual - are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life - in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man. — Otto Rank

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority. — Sherrie Levine

I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles. — David Hume

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. — Friedrich Engels

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes. — Louis Althusser

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht ) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them. — Eugene Ionesco