Creativity Quote by Laurie Anderson

Anderson’s line lands like a quiet prophecy from someone who’s spent decades turning technology into stagecraft. She isn’t marveling at the internet as a utopia; she’s describing a constraint that will reshape art from the inside out. “Adjust their work” is the tell: the Net isn’t just a new venue, it’s an instrument with a brutal limitation baked in. The “very small screen” is both literal (phones, early laptops, the shrinking window where culture gets consumed) and psychological (attention spans, the private, solitary posture of looking down).

The specific intent feels practical, almost workshop-level: if you want to make work that lives online, you can’t pretend it’s a concert hall or a gallery wall. You design for proximity, for intimacy, for quick legibility. Anderson’s subtext is sharper: the medium doesn’t politely host your vision; it edits it. Scale, duration, texture, even ambiguity get pressured by portability and the scroll. The Net’s promise of infinite distribution comes paired with a demand for miniaturization.

Context matters because Anderson comes from performance art and experimental music, worlds built on bodily presence, room acoustics, and the slow build of attention. Her warning (and invitation) anticipates the culture we now live in: art optimized for a handheld rectangle, where the close-up beats the wide shot, where the work competes with notifications, where “content” becomes the default format. She’s not mourning that shift so much as naming the trade: reach in exchange for reduction, and the chance to reinvent form inside the constraint.