The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love.
Interpretation
Art has a profound and unifying power, akin to a religious experience, that can deeply affect individuals.
Francois Pinault compares the passion for art to religious devotion, suggesting that art has the power to connect people through a shared understanding of humanity. He conveys the idea that art is not something that can be owned; instead, it possesses those who create or appreciate it, leading to a transformative experience much like falling in love.
In practice
In a gallery opening speech to emphasize the importance of art in bringing people together.
Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
I feel like in telling stories, there are the things the audience thinks are important, and then there are the things that are actually important.
Films made by women belong to the history of cinema; it's just that we get erased pretty quickly.
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
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