A Quote by Edward Abbey

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

Edward Abbey

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Art Art Is Literary Literary Art Modern Modern World Necessarily Political Which World

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome-not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.

Thomas Huxley

Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.

Stephen Fry

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

Louise Bourgeois

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

Christopher Lasch

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Vaclav Havel

Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.

John Stuart Mill

The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.

Unknown

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.

Pankaj Mishra

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.

Clive James

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics. We're talking about a closeted person with minimum contact with reality who has trouble tying his f**king shoes! And he's supposed to be political? A bus driver has a better perspective on things. Artists are completely indulgent.

Jonathan Santlofer

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

Peter Schjeldahl

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

Hans Haacke

In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.

Mao Zedong

Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist.

Orhan Pamuk

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.

Amiri Baraka

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

V. S. Pritchett

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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