A Quote by Ben Lerner

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Ben Lerner

Quote Topics

Affirmative Artists Culture Fetish Interest Made No Interest Purely Stupidity

Quote Author

Ben Lerner
American - Novelist
Born: February 4, 1979

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

Desmond Tutu

Jesus' birthday is commercialized, so of course, Black History Month is commercialized.

Jidenna

I have an odd fetish with nails. I was always doing beauty blogs about nails, and it would be on Fridays called 'Friday's Fingertip Fetish.' It became so popular that a nail polish company approached me, and Fingertip Fetish was born.

Adrienne Bailon

You know policy is driven purely in self interest. The Federal Reserve Bank and the commercial banks and the Wall Street banks are not acting in the interests of the population at large, they're acting purely in their own self-interest, which is a shame because they're actions dictate the reality for 300 million Americans. But they don't see it that way, they see it only as a way to preserve their own self-interest.

Max Keiser

I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.

Edwidge Danticat

I have an odd fetish with nails. I was always doing beauty blogs about nails, and it would be on Fridays called Fridays Fingertip Fetish. It became so popular that a nail polish company approached me, and Fingertip Fetish was born.

Adrienne Bailon

I assure you that interest in Japanese culture in Russia is just as strong as interest in Russian culture in Japan.

Vladimir Putin

I went and hung out at a foot fetish party, and I knew that was a very popular fetish to have, but I didn't realize how amazing it would be to have it.

Nikki Glaser

You have a transportation fetish. I have a Gideon fetish. It's been weeks.

Sylvia Day

Among the Indians, as among other nations, some people are born artists, but most are not. I am a born artist. I have as much interest in my people as any anthropologist, and I have studied our culture and lore. My aim is to reassemble the pieces of a once proud culture, and to show the dignity and bravery of my people.

Norval Morrisseau

Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

Florence King

Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.

Ai Weiwei

Fetish is the exploration of sex as art, and the refinement of one’s personal desires. Anything can be fetishised...There’ll be new fetishes forever. I feel that the 21st century is all about fetish.

Rick Castro

I think, for the most part, our culture embraces that artists are born, not made.

Chris Van Allsburg

There is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.