Diane Paulus Quotes

I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful.

I really like reaching out and seeing the audience - they're potential audiences! And on occasion I can make them excited about going to the theater again, if they've ceased or gone less.

I want to put concepts in front of people that make them laugh or smile or even hate what I do. I'm not interested in just putting clothes in stores.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

In order to do a musical now, a style must be developed that works for today's audience.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Dancers, like all performing artists, like nothing better than to be challenged.

I think the audience know which films are aimed at their pocket, and which films are aimed at their soul. There are a lot of films out there made by people who are genuinely trying to make a change.

Every artist says that he/she wants to do something challenging, and I'm not any different. If someone approaches me with a serious role, I'll be more than happy.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

Everyone pays lip service to this whole idea of doing more new plays, and nobody ever does it.

In my opinion, the most dangerous thing an artist can do in this day and age is not embrace the present.

Made in Catteland is a project that aims to overcome the boundaries of the work of art as we're used to thinking of it: exploring new possibilities of reaching the audience through the creation of new forms of art.

Part of the problem with producing contemporary political theater in America today is that many theaters don't have flexibility or resources, be it hiring a lot of actors or staging a work that might be tough for some audience and board members.

Art has to be able to match life, to respond to the ever-changing forms of the world, to electrify the audience.

It's crazy how a whole lot of African artists work. Big respect to everyone that does it, but I have not heard anything that really cuts across. We're trying to do that.

We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.

Dirty Projectors has always been a band that's been card-carrying modernists in terms of pushing different kinds of abstraction to the fore and trying to take them to the center of the culture or something like that.