I value the people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable and share work that is sensitive and maybe even hard to sing sometimes. Because that's the music that provides the most solace and solidarity to the world.
You don't have to make something in order to retain your identity as an artist or a writer or a creative person. A lot of people think they have to be producing in order to maintain that identity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
An artist's identity isn't solely defined by their creations; it's about their inherent creativity.
This quote by Lucy Dacus emphasizes that being an artist, writer, or creative individual is not contingent upon constant production. Many people mistakenly believe that their creative identity is tied only to the work they produce; however, one's identity as a creative person exists independently of the quantity or frequency of their output. This viewpoint encourages creatives to value their identity and perspective, even during periods of inactivity or absence of completed work.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During an art workshop, to encourage participants who feel pressured to constantly create.
More from Lucy Dacus
All quotes →I like to think of hope as a fact and something that wins out always. Whether you're hopeful or not, actually, you do get through what you're in the middle of. When you're in it, you don't feel like that's possible. But time and time again, we're proven wrong.
When you're a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.
You have to laugh at things in order to let them be what they truly are. Because nothing is only sad. Nothing is only funny. There's context to all of those things.
Similar quotes
Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.
When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.
Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.
Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose.