A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.
Bill ViolaRead
Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
Interpretation
Art aims to awaken the deeper emotions and consciousness of individuals amidst a busy and automated society.
Bill Viola suggests that art serves as a crucial tool for awakening the human spirit in a world that often prioritizes speed and efficiency over personal depth and emotional connection. In this fast-paced, industrialized environment, where people may become desensitized or disengaged from their inner selves, art becomes a means to stimulate and revive the soul, encouraging a deeper appreciation for life and existence.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education, you might quote this to highlight the transformative power of art.
A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.
You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.
To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.
Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
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