Transient Art Quotes

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

My songs are like Bic razors. For fun, for modern consumption. You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth.

Theatre can't be done again and again and again and again - it's organic.

The kind of improv that I'm particularly addicted to is the kind that... aims at creating a momentary, fragmentary experience that has a totality to it. It's kind of like fireworks. It's the more ephemeral of art forms - once it's gone, it's gone, baby.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.

The modern dance is no dance in the first place, and when you've finally learned it, it's not modern any more.

I'm not interested in disposable music.

Films come and go. Families stay.

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there's an understanding, a realization that we'll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life.

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.

Ballet is a finite art - your body won't let you do it forever, so I wanted to do it while I could.

My memory is not so good so my most memorable show is the last one I played. Songs are written with intention but they only emerge in the moment.

Music isn't necessarily made to last, and there's always been disposable music.

You make beauty and it disappears, I love that.

Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.

What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.

I was tired of illustration. You'd work so hard on a commission and it would go in to a magazine, and you'd turn the page and it was gone.

As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.