Taking in useful information
One of the benefits of living in an era when one can conduct research by trawling through search engines and social media platforms is the possibility of easily coming across nuggets of information that could have the potential to transform ways of seeing the world.
Watching a luminary of popular culture expressing thoughts and feelings about what they set out to do initially then becomes data that can be filed away in one’s memory, useful for inspiration at a later stage.
In the performing arts, practitioners are often conditioned into believing there is something more prestigious about engaging with acknowledged classics than to be seen or heard in the context of making contemporary work.
This mindset creates situations where artists become in their quests to be “respectable”, when they have the potential to be creators of new classics for current times.
Since the combination of factors that produces such works is not anything that can be turned on like a tap, or presented as a formula, it makes sense for artists to be as attentive as possible to events and circumstances as they emerge in the passage of time.
