Visual Protest Quotes

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.

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.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

In the case of the Obama poster, I was just exercising my First Amendment rights - and my free speech is exercised visually. People who want to talk or write in order to share an opinion about Obama can do that, but when I want to say what I think about him, I need to make a portrait.

There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.

Some people are enraged, and some people are applauding. If there were a mission statement for graffiti, that would be it.

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, 'New Museum,' to be an act of civil disobedience. It's not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It's painting as insurgency.

In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.

Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.