WEBVTT

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Why make art?

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What do you find by doing it?

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What does it get you?

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I always wanted an alternative existence,

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and by that I mean I wanted to do something

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where I could study my own 
sentiments and experiences.

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And I found that I could do that in relation to making things and making art in particular.

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And I did it since I was a kid,

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and it was a place that I always could go to,

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that I could concentrate and deal with problems

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that I thought were of interest to me.

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And, if I was clear enough about

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what it was that I was probing and stayed with the premise of what I was probing,

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it was possible that it could also 
be clear to someone else.

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And it was important that it not be 
something that somebody else had done.

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I think one of the things art does is

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it asks you to perceive what it is on its own level.

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And it can come up and grab you at any time.

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It can be reassuring.

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It could be exactly the opposite.

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It could agitate you.

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It could be something you dismiss.

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It could be something that engages you.

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It could be something you recall.

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It could be something that leads to things

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that have nothing to do with what you're looking at.

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So, I think, works of art engage, possibly,

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an internal memory bank that isn't linear,

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and it can make you see 
the outside reality in that way, also.

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Like, you probably see the world

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in ways that you would not have seen it

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if those artists had not existed.

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And do I think that Cézanne changed

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how people saw a landscape in France
in the last century, for sure.

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Do I think Warhol changed how we see
contemporary society through painting,

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through the media-ization of, the commodification of objects?

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For sure.

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And you can just go through 
the history of art that way,

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and immediately you conjure up something

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that you, yourself, could not have expressed,

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and it fulfills in each of us something we lack.