Art & Creativity Quote by Alexander Kluge

Kluge skewers program television with the cool precision of someone who’s spent a career testing how images can think. His target isn’t “TV is bad,” but the bureaucratic nervous system behind broadcast culture: the program director as a standing committee for taste, risk, and time. In that world, decisions aren’t aesthetic conclusions; they’re scheduling solutions. Art, by contrast, can be commissioned, funded, censored, even ruined by dependency, yet it retains a stubborn inner jurisdiction. “It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors” is the knife-twist: Kluge grants material reality (budgets, institutions, patrons) while insisting that art’s defining feature is refusal of managerial hierarchy.

The subtext is postwar German media politics. Kluge emerged alongside the New German Cinema, a movement built in revolt against both commercial entertainment and state-shaped cultural consensus. Program television, especially in its public-service guise, sells itself as democratic and educational. Kluge exposes the trade: it looks like mass enlightenment, but it runs on gatekeeping routines that neutralize autonomy before a frame is shot. “Program” is doing extra work here; it’s not just content, it’s governance.

The line also reads as self-defense. Kluge made work that behaves like an essay: discontinuous, argumentative, allergic to the “viewer-friendly” arc. Broadcast logic demands predictability, a stable audience contract, a boss who can say yes or no. Kluge’s definition of art is an insurgent workflow: accountable to reality, not to superiors.