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I chose to paint because the medium as such has a particular meaning. It is almost synonymous with what is popularly viewed as Art - art with a capital A-with all the glory, the piety, and the authority that it commands.

— Hans Haacke

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Source: In: Bois,Yve-Alain, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss. "A Conversation with Hans Haacke." in: October : The First Decade 30 (fall 1984): 23-48
Source quality: Source identified Names the work or year, but without an exact location.

More by Hans Haacke

I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts.

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More quotes by Hans Haacke

The artist's business requires his involvement in practically everything. He works in reference, not to a section of the world, but to the whole world.

A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions.

The art world as a whole, and museums in particular, belong to what has aptly been called the "consciousness industry."

A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg,... is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake.

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that...

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hans Haacke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.