Art & Creativity Quote by Alexander Kluge

Kluge’s line lands like a shrug that’s also a warning: the old idea of a pure medium, chosen freely and defended like a territory, is basically obsolete. Coming from a director who’s spent decades hopping between film, television, books, and theory, it isn’t a plea for “multimedia” as a lifestyle brand. It’s a diagnosis of how culture now circulates - chopped up, reformatted, redistributed, and monetized across platforms that don’t ask permission.

The first sentence rejects the hierarchy that once sorted serious art (books) from mass media (TV), or cinema from everything “lesser.” Kluge’s project has always been to treat the public sphere as something you can edit and rewire, not simply enter. So the lack of contradiction isn’t just aesthetic flexibility; it’s tactical. If narrative, argument, and memory are fought over in different arenas, you work in all of them.

Then comes the sting: “These days you can’t choose.” That’s not creative defeatism so much as an acknowledgment that infrastructure now chooses for you. Distribution channels, attention economies, and algorithmic gatekeepers shape what forms are legible, fundable, and even thinkable. Artists don’t merely express; they negotiate interfaces. Kluge’s subtext is political: when media systems intensify, autonomy shrinks unless you become fluent in their languages. His refusal to romanticize medium-specific purity reads as both survival strategy and critique of a culture industry that forces constant translation.