Provocative Art Quotes

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

Music, at its very best, is dangerous.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

I think art should be controversial. I think it should make people think.

Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

I remember once doing a benefit for a Jewish charity and wearing an enormous cross. I kind of don't let the audience dictate anything to me. I sort of dictate to them, and they better be on board.

Art has an obligation to offend

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption.

My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.

I always like to create things that get attention. It used to be a problem when I wasn't famous. Now, I can do whatever I want and people have to accept it.

I said yes to 'Nymphomaniac' before it was written.

If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job.

Sometimes art is just about getting a reaction, that's really the end-all be-all.

As artists, it’s our job to delve into the uncomfortable, the difficult and the challenging.

There are contemporary artists that I hate with all my heart. These are provocateurs that are without feeling. Where is the real emotion?

I think a lot of the most interesting work in art and in films are often kind of polarized opinions and affect people in very different ways, which may be less successful commercially, but they elicit a dialogue that's quite interesting.

I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.

I wanna sing about something that's sexy and edgy.

I am really the most controversial artist in the world.