A Quote by David Rakoff
The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
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Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.
As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.
For me, making films is about trying to work something out by myself in quite a lonely way. I find the whole thing very lonely really.
Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.
A secondhand wardrobe hand clothes doesn't make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, or HIV. I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay doesn't make one witty... the only thing that makes one an artist is making art.
This is the thing: Art is more important than making a show, something that amuses people. Art is something that needs to give to the public, to the actors, to the artist - to give something that makes life the paradise it can be. Life can be a paradise. Still, I believe that. Even if there is Trump, there can be a paradise.
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
If you go far enough out you can see the Universe itself, all the billion light years summed up time only as a flash, just as lonely, as distant as a star on a June night if you go far enough out. And still, my friend, if you go far enough out you are only at the beginning - of yourself.
People are always warning me that I'm going to burn out. But the truth is, the only thing that tires me out is hearing people tell me that. Opposite shows, opposite coasts, opposite demographics, opposite everything - I love it, man!
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.
The only thing I think about is doing something where I'm the only person making all the decisions - I think that would be fun to do, just to get it out of my system. And honestly, I kind of got it out of my system when I recorded three songs and put them online. That was enough of a solo experience for me; it scratched that itch.
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
I get inspiration from all kinds of things: I can get it from hanging out with my son, from hanging out with my wife, from checking out different artists, from hearing something at a party.
In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.
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