A Quote by Lewis Hyde

Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.

Lewis Hyde

Quote Topics

Act Art Becomes Collective Create Does Faithful Force Image Nor Organize Parties Political Power Rather Representation Self Servant Simply Spirit Through Work

Quote Author

Lewis Hyde
Essayist
Born: 1945

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 Church is not a political power, nor a political party, but rather a moral reality, a moral force.

Pope Benedict XVI

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

John Luther Adams

The subject of contemporary art should include a political dimension, the distrust contemporary art has towards the existing order. One manifestation of this distrust is the mechanical dichotomization between art's form and its political content; the other is the institutionalizing tendency of anti-institutionalization. We almost never resist ourselves - the part of ourselves that has been institutionalized. We have occupied the word "resistance" and have become its owner, while "resistance" has become our servant. Thus, we own "resistance" and occupy it as a position of power.

Wang Jianwei

I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I'm black and a woman. You don't necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you're a woman.

Mickalene Thomas

When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.

Kehinde Wiley

In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act.

Corey Stoll

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

Carrie Brownstein

Both parties act in their political self-interest. Indeed, that's the purpose of a political party. But unlike Democrats, at least Republicans are honest about it.

Michael J. Knowles

The United States is in the midst of many spirited political debates about national priorities and public spending... However, we have found that science is an area where both political parties can find common ground, and in which political change does not necessarily create discontinuities.

John Gibbons

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.

Katie Kitamura

In one sense it is evident that the art of kingship does include the art of lawmaking. But the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability.

Plato

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

Josh O'Connor

One of the greatest own goals in modern British political history helped create one of the biggest political parties in the western world, but one committed to socialism rather than rehashed Blairite triangulation.