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.
Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.
If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.
I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.
I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.
When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.
There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
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