If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Interpretation
Art reflects societal values, and changes in culture influence artistic expression.
Salman Rushdie's quote emphasizes that art is a mirror of society. As cultural perceptions, particularly about women, evolve, so too does the nature of art produced in that society. However, he warns against the expectation for art itself to initiate social change, suggesting that it is not the primary purpose of artistic expression.
In practice
In a discussion on the evolution of contemporary art in a university lecture.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
I bid the chords sweet music make, And all must follow in my wake.
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
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