Art can be engaged in the world without being specifically politically engaged.
Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into words.
You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.
A lot of artists who have a certain style are expected to more or less keep doing their style. It’s so easy to get into that rut of production.
I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, “Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don’t want to see something crappy. They don’t. They want to be at something really special.”
And there was a beutiful view But nobody could see Cause everybody on the island Was saying Look at me! Look at me.
It’s just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.
At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.
It’s the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country – to get a better view.
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
Audiences, whether they’re seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.
The audience creates its own personality, I’ve noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I’m fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away.
I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd – was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.
People are really suffering these days. There’s a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.
All of nature talks to me – if I could just figure out what it’s saying – trees are swinging in the breeze. They’re talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They’re all talking. They’re talking to me.
I kind of didn’t believe the doctors when they came over and they said you’re not going to be able to walk again. I’m sorry to tell you this. I thought who is this guy? I just was so impatient with the whole thing. I knew I was going to walk again. I knew that I was going to do that.
The best thing about the term ‘performance artist’ is that it includes just about everything you might want to do.
When love is gone, there’s always justice.
Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.
So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about.