I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.
Interpretation
Entertainment can be considered art if it evolves naturally, rather than forcing it to fit the classification of art.
Steve Martin's quote highlights the distinction between entertainment and art, suggesting that while entertainment can achieve the status of art, the intention to create art itself can lead to failure. It emphasizes that genuine artistry often emerges organically rather than through deliberate effort, and that sometimes striving too hard for a label can detract from the quality of the work.
In practice
During a lecture on the evolution of art, this quote can serve to illustrate the fine line between art and entertainment.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.
I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.
...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
Reviews for someone like me come in three packages. One is justifiable praise, the second is justifiable criticism, and the third is, "This is only published because he's a celebrity."
If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
If there is such a thing for Sparks as a mission statement, it's more general in that we want each new album to be musically and lyrically provocative. We want to really go at it as though this might be the first album that anyone will ever hear of Sparks.
Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven :- That is by letters written with their quills.
Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. 'M*A*S*H' is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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