Lloyd Kaufman Quotes

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.

All art is exploitation.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

The only way to eliminate any government choice on what art is worthwhile, what art isn't worthwhile, is to get the government totally out of the business of funding.

I turned to historical films because they pass censors more easily.

Art penetrates, no matter how many bans you put out.

I don't like the notion that artists have a responsibility to be political.

The less subsidy we have, the more the 'producers' take over, and the 'bottom line' becomes the raison d'etre. That's quite an unappealing landscape for artists.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, which are really forces of censorship -either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

We need to give artists a lot of free room to create.

To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.

Any piece of art, when you're putting it on a certain platform, if the platform becomes a political place, you can manipulate things.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.

You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?