No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art.
Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.
Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can't provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.
I do like to write nasty songs. It's a useful weapon to have, and it's cathartic as well, because I create art out of anger, something positive out of something negative.
Art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals, we made stained-glass windows, we made murals.
We spend more time at cinemas, theaters, art galleries and theme parks than we do at churches, and they have become our new cathedrals. We can spend hours at any of these places of entertainment but if church service goes on too long we get impatient.
I'm Chief Executive Officer at Art of the Olympians Museum in Fort Myers, Florida, which was founded by my Mexico City teammate Al Oerter and his wife Cathy in 2005. It shows that Olympians can have another life; we have got art from more than 100 Olympians.
When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.
We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.
I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.
Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.
Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.
I feel funny about owning art. I don't really want to say: 'Wow, come and see my Monet - it's in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar.'
I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
I'm an advocate of all mediums - it's a larger canvas for us as artists - but we have to keep in mind that celluloid film is what created this wonderful art form, and we have to keep it alive.
Film is the most liberal of arts and, at the same time, it can be a very conservative art. Money that is involved in filmmaking is distributed mostly to men, thus creating a celluloid ceiling for women.
I have to say, Alejandro Colucci is amazing. I had seen his work several times before I started making the connection between the art and the person making it, and when I heard that he was going to work on the cover for 'Seven Forges,' that connection was not yet cemented.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
