Creativity Quote by Arto Lindsay

A “turning point” is usually framed as destiny with a spotlight: the night everything changed. Arto Lindsay undercuts that myth with a sideways qualifier - “in the sense that” - and then yanks the focus from individual genius to scene-level chemistry. The line isn’t trying to sound profound; it’s trying to be accurate about how avant-garde culture actually moves: not via one masterpiece, but via a dense social ecosystem where people steal, remix, and accidentally invent in public.

The slightly mangled phrasing (“we can up”) reads like speech caught mid-thought, which fits the ethos Lindsay came out of: downtown New York’s late-70s/early-80s no wave and the broader art-punk continuum where polish was suspect and friction was a method. His bands and collaborations treated “new ideas” less as precious inspiration and more as a supply chain: find a constraint, break a rule, make it a sound. Calling it a turning point “as a scene” signals a collective shift in permission. Someone tries a new texture, a new performance attitude, a new way of failing on purpose, and suddenly the group’s idea of what’s allowed expands.

The subtext is also anti-nostalgia. He’s not romanticizing a golden era; he’s describing a practical moment when the room got smarter. Turning points, in this telling, aren’t thunderclaps. They’re when a community’s shared vocabulary mutates fast enough that you can feel the future being drafted in real time.