“‘Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?’ To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.

I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question-do things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?-may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing—subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“My final advice for artists who decide to devote themselves to the art of photomontage: never part company with the pencil. Remember, not a single day without a drawing! Only thus and only then will you perfect your mastery, will the truth of life exist in your works, and they will without fail find response in the viewer’s soul.”

— Alexander Zhitomirsky

“What sort of cultivation, or civilization and improvement, is ours to boast of, if it turns out that, as in this instance, unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are,—if we leave the land poorer than we found it?
Is it good economy, to try it by the lowest standards, to cut down all our forests, if a forest will pay into the town treasury a greater tax than the farms which may supplant it,— if the oaks by steadily growing according to their nature leave our improvements in the rear?”

— Henry David Thoreau

“What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought. I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all being to sense that we are the same, we are one.”

— David Hockney

“I am amused at the gymnastics the design community is performing as it attempts to write its own definition. We, as designers, are eager to expand and embrace multimedia and animation, but contract into apologies if we get too close to “Art.”

Why? Whose honor are we protecting by denying the natural, frequent and essential crossover? Art or design? I wonder if we fear inadequacy in judging quality and value once the line is crossed.

Even my dear friend David Shields explains that “Design is not art because designers design for the community: for everybody, for the public, for whomever-for an audience. It’s about creating dialogues.” But what does this argument imply about artists?

Some argue that our fields remain separate because, unlike artists, our messages are rarely our own. I doubt that authorship is nearly as important in determining categories as is so insistently claimed. Consider film. Would a filmmaker not consider him or herself an artist if the film told someone else’s story?

We are all working within a visual realm, and shaking out the art from the non-art seems like an empty gesture. I’ve been reading Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet, and in it he quotes Jean Cocteau: “Fashion must be beautiful first and ugly afterwards. Art must be ugly first, then beautiful afterwards.”

An intriguing thought, given our context. With this definition in mind, and the preceding debates, it should be easy to choose up sides and continue working.”

— Martin Venezky (1994)

“The capitalist system makes people stupid and then makes them arrogant in their stupidity.”

— Kwame Ture

“I taught three semesters at Pratt in Manhattan. I taught cartooning to illustrators. I broke things down to their simplest components the way a cartoonist would think. I started out with a class of maybe thirty-eight or so and oh my God I knew how to get rid of a lot of them. “Look,” I said, “this is a country of 250 million people and every one of you in this class can probably draw better than me.” Which made them feel very good. I explained that I was basically going to move their talent from their wrist up to their brain. The next week there’d be sixteen people there and a note from the director: “See me after class.” These sixteen people of course know nothing about cartooning. They drew beautifully, but millions of people can draw and paint beautifully. I was trying to give them a mental advantage I have.”

— Sam Gross

“Imagination is a muscle. Exercise it. Use your imagination. And by that I don’t mean just watch and read imaginative fiction or fantasy, because I think that if anything that is actually sapping the imagination. The fact that all of our imaginative needs can be instantly met by one of the streaming services, or the click of the mouse, I think that that makes for weak imaginations. I think that that possibly means if that trend continues, if people continue to be passively entertained, then their imaginations will possibly atrophy.

Get out there and imagine something. Doesn’t matter whether if it’s any good or not. Imagine something, and then try to imagine another thing, and see how that gets you.”

— Alan Moore