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.
Cinema is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presuppose some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability.
Underwater, I experience space with my body. I'll see a school of fish gathering and moving together and I'll exclaim, 'This is architecture.'
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Hollywood wants to own everything. I don't want to own anything. I don't want people just to make content, I want to empower and teach them to create content they own that they can exploit in any medium.
All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
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