Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s sentence reads like an artist’s confession disguised as a shrug: he’s making “theatrical music” not because the market needs it, but because his own life does. That phrasing is doing heavy work. It frames art less as expression than as substitution - a prosthetic for something “desperately missing,” a private lack that can’t be patched by ordinary living. In Foreman’s world, theater isn’t a mirror; it’s an engineered environment, a sound-and-sense machine built to generate the intensity reality withholds.

The sly tension is in the second half: “if other people don’t like it, I’m very unhappy, but I can’t do anything about that.” He refuses the standard romantic posture of indifference. He wants the audience’s love; he just won’t bargain for it. The unhappiness is real, even slightly petulant, yet the refusal to adjust is a boundary line: changing the work to be liked would destroy the very function the work serves for him. The subtext is almost parental: I made this because I had to; I still want you to accept it; I’m not changing it to earn your acceptance.

Context matters. Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater pushed against naturalism and easy emotional catharsis, favoring fragmentation, noise, and thought-jolts that can feel abrasive to conventional taste. The quote anticipates the perennial avant-garde dilemma: needing an audience while rejecting the audience’s usual contract. He’s not apologizing for difficulty; he’s admitting its cost.