You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.
Interpretation
Embrace the depth of art rather than forcing it to conform to your understanding.
This quote by Steven Soderbergh emphasizes the importance of allowing art to challenge and expand our perspectives instead of trying to limit it to our existing understanding. It suggests that true appreciation of art requires an open mind that seeks to grow and adapt rather than one that forces simplifications onto creative expressions.
In practice
In an art class, when discussing a challenging piece, one might say, 'Remember, you’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, not the other way around.'
If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.
When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, 'OK, so the makers of 'Get Out' should've sold that movie to a platform? Then they don't have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.'
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.
Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
A success, to me, is the ability to keep working. That's success. It has nothing to do with money; it's the ability to keep getting things made, period.
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.
We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.
Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.
People always say when they meet me that I'm not what they expect. I assume they think I'm this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.
Before Turner there was no fog in London.
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
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