Media Art Quotes & Sayings

This year, notoriety got confused with fame, and the devil is down hearted because there is nothing left for him to claim. — Don Henley

Bring me a girl, they're always the best. You put 'em on stage, and you have 'em undress. — Tom Petty

Hey ugly folks, go get some cyanide and die. — Frank Zappa

You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place. — Queen Elizabeth II

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on. — Umberto Eco

Lookin at herself, but wishing she was someone else because the body of the doll that don't look like hers at all. So she straps it on, she sucks it in, she throws it up and gives a grin. — Jack Johnson

I hear you're losing weight again, Mary Jane. Do you ever wonder who you're losing it for? — Alanis Morissette

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk. — Douglas Adams

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed. — Bob Dylan

This is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we have the ability to step out of the story altogether. Renaissances are historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. People in a variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. — Douglas Rushkoff

Sex sells everything, but I don't buy it. — Natalie Imbruglia

We rappers are role models. — Kanye West

You are your own superstar, and only you can shape the movie that you make. — Roger Hodgson

See the man on the TV with a phony smile. Bring you up, bring you down, he can turn your head around. — Van Morrison

Where have you been hanging out lately honey? You can't dress trashy 'til you spend a lot of money. — Billy Joel

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science. — Rick Perlstein

I was, like, a history major, and I minored in art and Spanish, but I found myself gravitating toward media studies as time went on. — Nick Kroll

Rita Haywood gave good face. — Madonna Ciccone

Listen not to the critics who put their own dreams on the shelf. — Garth Brooks

She's staring down her desires, while they're staring down her dress. — Phil Ochs

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. — W. H. Auden

Plexi, plexi, bend don't shatter. Once you're broken, shape won't matter. — Jack Johnson

If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell. — Gordon Lightfoot

Don't tell me what they did to you as though you had no choice. Tell me, isn't that your picture? Isn't that your voice. — Ani DiFranco

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction. — Bell Hooks

While the concept of the muse is noteworthy, the development of the muse has changed substantially in today's online world. The tables have practically turned as the artist who is responsible for creating music in today's world is now being the muse to others. They have been responsible for the creation of "fan art," a style of performance where people create new forms of media based off of existing creations.
It was originally that the muse was what prompted the artist to create something new. Today it has changed to where the artist is the muse to others in society. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open. — Jerry Saltz

Imagination is a powerful deceiver. — Elvis Costello

New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy. — Jen Pollock Michel

I get to cry to Barbara Walters, when things don't go my way. I'll get community service no matter which laws I break. — Brad Paisley

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life. — Robert Hughes

Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold. — Michael Jackson

Rock and roll cola wars, I can't take it any more. — Billy Joel

The good Samaritan, he's getting dressed, he's getting ready for the show. He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row. — Bob Dylan

In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart. — Shawn Lukas

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. — Arundhati Roy

You make alterations, affecting your pose, a new house, a new car, a new job, a new nose. — Ray Davies

You're a victim from my drive-by of thoughts. — Dr. Dre

Who you going to tell when the repercussions spin, showing off your ass because you think it's a trend. — Lauryn Hill

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position. — Thom Mayne

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. — Jennifer Baumgardner

Her head is full of bubbles, her nose is petite, she looks like she never gets nothing to eat. — Frank Zappa

You went to Woodstock and all that trash, your generation is fading fast. — Rod Stewart

You got your glory and you paid for it all, you take your pension in loneliness and alcohol. — Billy Squier

Music Tele-Vision should be covered in jism. — Mojo Nixon

As we celebrate mediocrity, all the boys upstairs want to see. How much you'll pay for what you used to get for free. — Tom Petty

As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls? — Erica Jong

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience. — Jack Bowman

I wanna be in the headlines, anything to be in the headlines. — Alice Cooper

I call it suffering and pain, they call it entertainment. — Ray Davies

There are two characters in me: a doodler and a tuner. And the only thing that makes me go crazy is when they both fight for their turn. — Shawn Lukas

I'll ruin everything you are, I'll give you television. — David Bowie

In today's world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As — Daniel Kahneman

Gave a girl herpes in exchange for syphilis, put my LP on your Christmas gift list. — Eminem

Your apocalypse was fab. — Tori Amos

I think with the whole new Internet media, I'm not necessarily Internet savvy, but I just feel that the way that art in general will be presented to the public is going to be different. — Alia Shawkat

For all the talk about the merging of film and video game, and for all its inevitability, perhaps the secret of true convergence lies not in an external reality , but in an internal truth: What kids seek from video games is what we all seek from our own distractions--be they movies, radio, comic books, literature, or art: an escape from the mundane to the sublime, where our imaginations make of us heroes, lovers, warriors, and gods. — Devin C. Griffiths

I wanna get on TV and just let loose. But can't, but it's cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose. — Eminem

Go to work and be a Hollywood stud, drive your four wheel drive right into the mud. — John Mellencamp

I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response. — Ellen Dissanayake

Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb. — Bob Dylan

So there I was in Hollywood, thinking I was doing good. — Eric Clapton

This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from. — Gregory Benford

You were bred for humanity and sold to society. One day you'll wake up in the present day, a million generations removed from the expectations of being who you really want to be. — Jethro Tull

I'm for turning off the tube and turning down the light, cause I'm for nothing else but me and you tonight. — Hank Williams Jr.

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today. — E. M. Forster

This is the golden age of grotesque. — Marilyn Manson

We could move catalog, if he'd only die quicker. — Tom Petty

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best. — Toni Morrison

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art. — Paul Di Filippo

Now my tapestry's unraveling. — Carole King

I stood in this unsheltered place, 'til I could see the face behind the face. — Peter Gabriel

We (pop stars) are people not androids. We've got views. I've got opinions and I don't see why I shouldn't use a bit of my art to put them over. I think music is one of the most powerful media forces in the world today. — Roger Meddows Taylor

In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. — Carl Honore

Everything is permitted, everything is allowed, and all our Gods we have outwitted, we are running with the crowd. — Meat Loaf

You look so polished from your hair down to your toes, but still your finger's gonna pick your nose. — Billy Joel

You're laughing at everything that's bringing me down. — Matthew Sweet

Jackass millionaires, hey, hey, Hollywood, here we come. — Brad Paisley

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

You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you. — Bob Dylan

Media saturation is probably very destructive to art. New movements get overexposed and exhausted before they have a chance to grow, and they turn to ashes in a short time. Some degree of time and obscurity is often very necessary to artists. — Joyce Johnson

I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then. — Alec Monopoly

Kill them now, cause I need some kicks. I need some kicks, I'm getting bored. — Lou Reed

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

Your bullshit culture licking can't stop the death watch ticking. — Ozzy Osbourne

You're only popular with anorexia. — Tori Amos

Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Media over here, coming to ya like a world premiere. Trench coat and my underwear, let's go with this freak show. — Britney Spears

My whole staff love to laugh and count the money. On the couch, hands in our pants like Al Bundy. — Nelly

The unavoidable kiss, where the minty fresh death breath is sure to outlast his catastrophe. — Jason Mraz

Being rich and famous seems to have its ups and downs. That's the price you pay for being troubadours and clowns. — Jimmy Buffett

Fortune or fame, you must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim. — Bob Dylan

Some are masters of illusions, some are ministers of trade, all under the same delusion, all their beds unmade. — Bob Dylan

She had a pretty face, but her head was up in space. — Avril Lavigne

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema. — Wesley Morris

Well, they'll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June. — Tom Waits

Rhyme written in graffiti xeroxed on blueprints, students influenced are now a nuisance. — Louis Eric Barrier

Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate. — Hans Haacke

All the fame and fortune, glory and prestige, can't make me happy if it goes against what I believe. — Dolly Parton

Oooh, fashion, we are the goon squad and were coming to town, beep beep. — David Bowie