A Quote by Mira Calix

I think the role of the artist today is about being provocative. I don't mean shocking, but you have to provoke people into action. As an artist, you ask people for their time. It's the most precious thing anyone has. I'm asking audiences to come to my work and spend some time with it. What I'm really doing, of course, is asking people to take time for themselves.
Being an artist doesn't just mean you have a song. That doesn't make you an artist. The word 'artist' means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists - Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West - are doing the most.
When I ask people how much time they spend not doing their job - time spent on 'work-about-work' or phone calls or e-mails - people regularly tell me 60, or even 90 percent. So if Asana could take that down closer to zero, we could potentially double the effectiveness of humanity.
I really admire people who concern themselves more with how they perceive the world rather than how the world perceives them. I think, as an artist, it's very important to do that. You can limit yourself a lot if you spend too much time caring about what people think of you.
Don't spend your precious time asking "Why isn't the world a better place?" It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is "How can I make it better?" To that there is an answer.
I don't think it's something that people would ask a man. Some people make a huge deal out of the fact that I sing about drinking all the time, but I don't think of it as singing about drinking. It's singing about emotions, and sometimes that centers around drinking. To me, I'm writing about things that I'm going through that mean something to me, but some people just reduce it to: "She must drink all the time." But if a guy sings about that sort of thing, no one really looks twice.
I respect people who come forward and speak, but I'm not asking most of the sex workers I interview now about their work. I'm asking them about their lives in general or their political organizing. I take pains source things pointing back to intellectual work that sex workers have produced, because that's really absent.
Oh all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series. There were people asking 'Can women be funny?' People still ask that. It's like asking: 'Can women breathe in and out?'
I love interaction with audiences. If were my choice, I would spend most of my time interacting with audiences. Walking around and asking them to challenge me.
People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.
What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.
I've been really lucky to spend some time around actors and artists I really admire. One thing I gathered from asking a lot of questions is that part of this job and this life we've chosen is doing personal exploration in front of an audience. In a lot of ways, that's what art is: personal searching with people watching.
Don't waste your singleness. I think we spend a lot of time griping about how we're single, and we spend a lot of time and energy being angry about that when we could be spending that time to really serve other people and use the free time we do have to do so much more for the Kingdom of God. So don't waste that time. Use it. You only get so much time and then you'll most likely get married and have kids and a husband and not have as much free time. So enjoy it and use it to serve other people.
The greatest thing anyone can do for God and man is pray. It is not the only thing; but it is the chief thing. The great people of the earth today are the people who pray. I do not mean those who talk about prayer; not those who can explain about prayer; but I mean those people who take time and pray.
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
I started blogging because I didn't know if I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to talk to other people online who were doing art, so I would post work and ask for feedback. I loved that an artist like James Jean would show his process on his blog. It became this open dialogue that, unfortunately, we don't have a lot in the fine-art world. People will say, "Wow, you share a lot." I'm like, "No, I make it a point to." Instagram is a great place for people to share failure. I don't want people to think that being an artist is some glamorous life.
I would imagine, a very large percentage of people who get something for art and they do something else, and they have some excess resources. And they trade those resources with artists whose work makes them feel good, or feel better, or question. And the artist, if they're smart, they use it to buy the most expensive thing in the world: time to make more. The more that come, the better it is for these people, their children, the people they care about, fills the society with a real constant thing.
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