To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of embracing uncertainty in the creative process.
David Byrne suggests that a degree of uncertainty and a lack of complete understanding can be beneficial for artists. This ambiguity allows for spontaneity and trust in the creative process, enabling artists to express themselves authentically. It highlights the idea that not always knowing the outcome can lead to innovative and genuine artistic expressions.
In practice
In an art class, a teacher might use this quote to encourage students to explore their creativity without fear.
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
It is only by presenting those portions of the race in my pictures, in the light and backround of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
How I have walked... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!
Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.
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