Creativity Quote by Kevyn Aucoin

Aucoin’s jab lands because it’s both rude and revealing: a virtuoso of surfaces policing the hierarchy of surfaces. In the late-90s, early-2000s media ecosystem, “film” still carried an aura of craft and permanence while TV was treated as the fluorescent back room of entertainment. He’s not just being snobbish; he’s defending an entire aesthetic religion in which light is morality. Calling bad TV lighting “sinful” isn’t casual hyperbole from a makeup artist - it’s theology. Light is the original special effect, the thing that turns skin into narrative.

The quote’s specific intent is to shame a production norm: television’s speed, budget constraints, and multi-camera setups that flatten faces, bleach nuance, and reward “good enough” consistency over sculpted drama. Aucoin frames it as an industry problem (“people who can’t do film”) but quickly narrows to a technical culprit, the lighting crew. That pivot matters. He exempts actresses, signaling his loyalty to performers, then indicts the system that makes them look worse than they are. It’s a pro-actor, anti-compromise rant.

Subtext: Aucoin is fighting for glamour as a form of dignity. If you believe beauty is constructed - and he did, openly, joyfully - then the conditions of construction are political. TV lighting becomes a metaphor for a culture that demands constant visibility while refusing to invest in how people are seen. Today’s “cinematic” prestige TV basically proves his point by correcting the sin: it spends like film, lights like film, and sells the result as seriousness.