Art And Revolution Quotes & Sayings

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art. — Octavio Paz

An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible. — Toni Cade Bambara

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead. — Harold Rosenberg

Having set its mark on the generation before Cocteau's, symbolism expressed a form of inner dissidence confronting the narrow-minded materialism and utilitarian obsession of the industrial revolution, and hence a reaction to triumphant naturalism, in literature at least. Nourished by medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic art, symbolism, probably the last great backward-looking movement hatched in the West, had given rise to a desire to explore the secrets of the world and the confines of the soul. Beyond its androgynous Mercuries, its pale Narcissuses, and its Orpheuses borne by rosaries of angels, it gave rise to a whole misty alchemy wherein some found their way into esotericism and even into the religious, since the Universe was only the symbol of another world into which entrance was gained not only through poetry, spiritualism, dreams, and the Ideal, but also via the play of analogies and the study of ciphers. — Claude Arnaud

I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them. — Nelson Mandela

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers. — Stephanie Perkins

Music is the biggest tool of revolution - the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can't contribute to the world with your art, I don't see the meaning of life. — Kailash Kher

Is there art that is more beautiful, more divine, and more eternal that the art of martyrdom? A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity. Those who wish to undermine this principle undermines the foundations of our independence and national security ... The message of the (Islamic) Revolution is global, and is not restricted to a specific place or time ... Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to
create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run,
therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its allotted
span. Each time that the revolution kills in a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself
a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to their laws, it will not
prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of
vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair. — Albert Camus

The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art. — Octavio Paz

If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive. — Roger Kimball

The world is going on a high-speed connection; the Arab revolution is still dial-up. So we have to give it a little time to download. Regimes come and go, but art endures. — Ziad Doueiri

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating. — Malcolm Gladwell

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. — Questlove

The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us. — Anthony Kennedy

It takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it takes to disturb the universe. And the price is often higher. — E.L. Konigsburg

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. — Ludwig Von Mises

They sit for hours in the "cafes" warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about "culture" "art" "revolution" and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsenses and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true. — Frida Kahlo

In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch. — Jonas Salk

There were counter-protests, of course, and in the end Mapplethorpe's work was exhibited, but the message to the arts community was clear: stray too far from the innocuous, and the axe would fall. Call it selective censorship: freedom of expression was guaranteed unless it was expressed in a work of art. The most amazing aspect of this American morality play was not that the government would place self-interest above principle when it felt threatened, but that no one foresaw this coming from miles down the road. A reminder from history: the American Revolution was not financed with matching Grants from the Crown. COMMON — David Bayles

It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution. — Marilynne Robinson

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot. — Robert Hughes

The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. — Blaise Pascal

General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters
except everything. — G.K. Chesterton

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. — Arundhati Roy

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art? — John Cage

By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, 'my kind' were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors. — Jerry Della Femina

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. — Vilem Flusser

Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. — Martin Filler

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant. — Leon Trotsky

Production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution. — Mark McMorris

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics
or more precisely, Revolution
co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church. — Octavio Paz

And yet at Yan'an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution. — Britt Daniel

The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice. — Blaise Pascal

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds? — Robert Hughes

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.

The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.

[from the introduction] — Dorothy Bussy

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. - ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Donella H. Meadows

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? — Charles McCarry

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. — Robert Hughes

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution! — Albert Einstein

Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greeks, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right — Oscar Wilde

In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept ... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss ... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand. — R. O. Blechman

"Black culture" is ready for whatever. I sense some momentum and excitement around black artists (especially in comedy, which is where most of my own art resides), really pushing the bounds of what has generally been expected as black. I don't think it's a revolution so much as an exposure of what has always been there, and now that the production and distribution means are more accessible, people can more easily find each other. — Baratunde Thurston

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. — Joseph Brodsky

When I moved into making sculpture, I could handle steel the way it had been handled in the technological revolution. I could use it the way bridge builders used it; I could use it the way they used it in industry and building and not the way it had been used in art. — Richard Serra

By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them. — Christian Dior

In the Year 2000 the discovery of extraterrestrial life will create a revolution in science, art, and pornography. — Conan O'Brien

I want to make a difference, I want to make a change, inspire a revolution, to create, reinvent, and rearrange. — Meagan Earls

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about. — A.E. Samaan

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas. — Robert Longo

The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come. — Roger Kimball

One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear. — John Vanderslice

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. — Edvard Munch

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. — Boris Pasternak