Nicolas Provost Quotes
My work looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.
Quotes to Explore
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I design all my sets. With my tour and my album artwork, I co-design that with people who are better at drawing than me. But I've got a good imagination. I went to art school so I understand how to communicate my ideas.
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The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.
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I think that's what art is about: to provoke you. It helps me make sense of a senseless universe because I become the god of the story. I create it, and I see it in all its lineaments in my own way and can control it – in a world in which everything else is out of control.
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The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
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In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.
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My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.
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My career? I never think of it as a 'career.' Art and music and all those things that I'm creating are just part of me.
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What thoughts are to the individual, art is to the community as a whole. That's where you reflect on who you are, who you hope to be, what you've gone through, and where you hope to go.
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Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
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We want a vernacular in art. No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity but that comprehensive and harmonizing unity with individual variety which can be developed among people politically and socially free.
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I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.
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Loads of computer graphics equals a terrible video in my book.
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The early expression of my youth was filled with all the aspects of art.
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For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.
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Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.
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My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.
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I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.
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I remember watching myself on video and being so disappointed with myself because I was constantly moving around the place and laughing. I thought, 'I must be so much louder than I think I am. From inside it feels fine.'
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I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.
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I have no patience with people who want to tell me what's wrong. I only want to hear from the person who first tells me the solution and then fills me in on the problem. I don't want to hear that your basement is flooded. I want to hear that you've found the number to the cleanup company. Then tell me why you're calling them.
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It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll; I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
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When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.
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My work looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.
