I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.
Interpretation
Entertainment can be considered art if it evolves naturally, rather than forcing it to fit the classification of art.
Steve Martin's quote highlights the distinction between entertainment and art, suggesting that while entertainment can achieve the status of art, the intention to create art itself can lead to failure. It emphasizes that genuine artistry often emerges organically rather than through deliberate effort, and that sometimes striving too hard for a label can detract from the quality of the work.
In practice
During a lecture on the evolution of art, this quote can serve to illustrate the fine line between art and entertainment.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do.
I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.
...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
Reviews for someone like me come in three packages. One is justifiable praise, the second is justifiable criticism, and the third is, "This is only published because he's a celebrity."
If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against mans fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.
Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.
I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
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