Happiness Quote by Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson’s generosity here isn’t the soft-focus kind; it’s a hard-won ethic from someone who’s spent decades watching “art” get treated like a velvet rope. “Anybody” is doing real work. She’s flattening the hierarchy that turns creativity into a status category and makes everyone else feel like they’re trespassing. In Anderson’s world, the line between artist and non-artist is less a talent test than a permission slip, and she’s tearing it up.

The phrase “tries to make something” is almost stubbornly plain, which is the point. She’s valorizing effort over aura, process over product, the messy middle over the polished reveal. “Tries” acknowledges the risk of failure without romanticizing it. That’s a subtle rebuke to the culture of effortless genius, where the most prized skill is making labor invisible. Anderson’s saying: I don’t need perfection. I need evidence that you showed up.

Then there’s the quiet pivot: “I’m happy to see the work.” Not “the masterpiece,” not “the result,” not “the brand.” The work is both the artifact and the labor behind it, a stance that fits an artist who made her name by foregrounding process - looping technology, spoken-word fragments, performance that shows its seams. The subtext is almost political: making things is a public good. In an attention economy that rewards hot takes and finished surfaces, Anderson is cheering for the unglamorous act of trying - and treating that attempt as something worth witnessing.