How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
All my albums always go with the times.
A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.
Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.
Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times - the pulse of today.
I'm interested in music that happens now and that relates to our lives now.
Literature may be light as a cobweb, but it must be fastened down to life at the four corners.
Most of stuff I audition for is stuff I think is socially relevant.
I am interested in seeing if you can create on film pieces that feel contemporary and urgent.
I think that what is important is that the music be honest and direct and that it is relevant to today. I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.
Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.
I want to make 'Broadway' a word that doesn't have pejorative connotation. I don't want 'musical theater' to be a dismissive term. I want it to be something that people can be proud of, that people can say, 'Look at the possibilities.'
We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.
What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
A strike bulletin or an impassioned leaflet are of more moment than three hundred pretty and faultlessly written pages about the private woes of a gigolo or the biological ferment of a society dame…
John Wesley Conroy
I like art with a visible string to the world.
We need theatre that is contemporary, lively and relevant, and the only way to do that is to take care of our playwrights and produce their plays.
