I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?
Amanda PalmerRead
There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.
Interpretation
Being an artist is a personal declaration, not bound by external validation or traditional paths.
Amanda Palmer's quote emphasizes that the journey to becoming a true artist is unique to each individual and does not rely on conventional markers of success such as education or fame. Instead, one becomes an artist by recognizing and affirming their own identity in that role, and by evoking meaningful emotions in others through their work.
In practice
In an art class to inspire students to believe in themselves.
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?
In other words, let's give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle, instead of ordering them to get back in the house and put some goddamn clothes on.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.
She lives the poetry she cannot write.
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
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