Creativity Quote by Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is swerving away from spectacle with the calm stubbornness of someone who’s already seen how cheaply “big” can be manufactured. When she says her work is about “trying to ask good questions,” she’s staking out a creative identity that treats art less like a product launch and more like a probe. The line isn’t modesty; it’s a rebuke. In an economy where attention is the prize, “big shows” become a default language of power: louder, shinier, more shareable. Anderson frames that bigness as generic, almost industrial, the kind of scale anyone with a marketing budget can buy.

The tell is in her comparison: fashion companies, car companies. Not other musicians, not filmmakers. Brands built on desire-management. She’s pointing to a cultural convergence where entertainment borrows corporate logic and corporations borrow entertainment tactics, until everything is a “moment” engineered for maximum impact. Underneath, there’s a warning: spectacle is no longer a marker of ambition or artistry, just of alignment with a system that equates size with value.

Anderson’s intent is to revalue the small but sharp: curiosity, ambiguity, discomfort, the kind of questions that don’t resolve neatly into a slogan. Coming from an artist whose career has lived between performance art, music, and technology, the stance reads as hard-earned. She’s not anti-show; she’s anti-automatic show, the kind that happens when you confuse scale with meaning. In a world optimized for wow, she’s arguing for work that keeps a conscience and a pulse.