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- Art produces the question — what is it for? what is this for? Entertainment does not produce any questions: its purpose is implied; built in. Art is ontologically queer; entertainment is ontologically obvious.
- In the theater, the audience member should be humiliated by making too much noise. If you can’t interrupt the play with movement or whispering, the theater is too big. In a reality-starved culture, we shouldn’t be too comfortable; too at ease. A play should be an ethical spider’s web for the audience.
- The novel was the artistic medium of the 19th century, the industrial age; cinema, of the 20th century, the modern age. But what is the artistic medium of our time — what reflects, refracts, organizes, and deploys our sensibility? I’m afraid to answer the question.
- Art and entertainment both propose to do the same thing: transform our Being. One is lying, one tells the truth.
- Putting on a play is an act of hospitality. Entering the theater should be like entering a home. All feelings of hostility should be paralyzed. And think about the root — as Derrida does — of the word hospitality. Host, hostage, hostile. The concepts are all wrapped around each other. The theater-goer is the moral hostage of the performance; the performance, the host, however, because the hostage of the audience — the actors cannot stop performing until the audience is gone.
- Art is important relative to the degree to which the culture which produces it is hostile towards its own production. The more we reject art, the more we need it.
