Creativity Quote by Laurie Anderson

“If there are bases on the moon” lands like sci-fi logistics, but Anderson’s punchline is really about a cultural heartbreak: the moment you build infrastructure on a symbol, you don’t just change the place, you change what it’s for. The moon, in her world, isn’t “real estate.” It’s a shared screen for projection - romance, solitude, madness, calendars, werewolves, lullabies, the whole long archive of human yearning. A base would turn that luminous ambiguity into a worksite.

Anderson’s intent is less anti-technology than anti-inevitability. She’s needling the way progress rhetoric treats desecration as neutral. “As we know it” is doing heavy lifting: she’s not predicting the moon’s physical destruction so much as naming the collapse of a relationship. Once the moon becomes a node in a supply chain, it stops being a distance you can look at; it becomes a destination with schedules, rules, and ownership. The enchantment doesn’t survive a payroll.

Context matters: Anderson comes out of the late-20th-century art world where media, surveillance, and militarized innovation blur together, and where the space race already proved that “exploration” often arrives wearing a flag. Her line anticipates today’s commercial space boom and its blandly corporate language. It’s funny, but the humor is defensive: a way to admit we’re about to do something irreversible, then pretend it’s just another upgrade.