WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ART IN SOCIETY? 

A Selection of quotes

“The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous.  Society functions, and always has, without the artist.  No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.”

Georg Baselitz, painter 

“People find it difficult to confront and express the truth and the reality of their lives.  Fear is the disease which prevents them from saying what they want to say.”

Heri Dono, Indonesian artist

“Creating a work of art is not a harmless thing.  It always is a powerful medium.  Art is extraordinarily powerful and important.  It challenges people’s lives. ”

Chögyam Trungpa

“It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman      to keep an eye on

            this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be

            listened to this time.”

Grace Paley – ‘Responsibility’

“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” 

Einstein

“Sustainable poetry… illuminates the deep ecology view that we need to adopt an ecocentric mode of living in the world if we are to survive. If            the role of philosophy is to inspire action, the role of poetry is to be in the world.  Like the laws of physics, like mathematics, this poetry is descriptive, not proscriptive.  It also accepts the sceptical view that full knowledge of the world cannot be attained through the medium of the senses.”  

Billy Mills

"For art to be relevant, artists must address the social and spiritual issues of our time."

“Our own cultural system is so pervasive that we tend to mistake its attitudes, practices and beliefs as a fact of life, the way things necessarily are”

Suzi Gablik

"The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society's weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved in shaping its present and its future."

Ken Saro-Wiwa

“Myself now includes the rainforest. It includes clean air and water.”

John Seed

“Solutions to social or environmental problems will never take place in an art gallery.”

Hilton Kramer

“The poet has to engage with the contending ideas that inform our understanding of time and matter, of biology and consciousness. We cannot disconnect poetry from philosophy, science and ecology, nor the historic moment which it is our fate to live.”

Peter Abbs

“What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”

Bill McKnibben

“Let’s not exclude the positive – art that’s capable of exciting us about the future. Moving people by the power of dreams needn’t just mean terrifying them into dissonance with nightmares.”

Ed Gillespie

“So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.”

Harold Pinter

“Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, sensation, and memory for the whole society… the community and its poetry are not two.”

Gary Snyder