Art Censorship Quotes

This cleaning up of our culture must extend to nearly all domains. Theater, art, literature, movies, the press, posters, and window displays must be cleaned of the symptoms of a rotting world and put into the service of a moral idea of state and culture.

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

A lot of the art that was destroyed was painted and created by Jews. A lot of that is gone because that was degenerative art. That's what Hitler was trying to get rid of.

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

In New York, Catholic groups have forced an art gallery to shut down an exhibition of a six-foot image of Jesus in chocolate. So, the Archbishop of New York was very upset. He said, 'It is appalling to make Jesus out of food! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go bake some communion wafers.'

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.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

When the arts become a political football, they lose.

It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project, it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

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.

You can't stop an artist from expressing his views through art.

Jessie Helms is trying to protect people from pornography and close down all the art shows in the United States, but he wants subsidies for tobacco that kills people.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.

That DMC Act is a disgrace. And the problem with independent art in this country is that independent artists have been economically blacklisted.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I've seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I've seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results.

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.

When I was young, beautiful ancient statues were castrated, so that the eye might not be corrupted.... Nothing was gained, unless horses and asses had also been castrated.

Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.