Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s line is a dare wrapped in a confession: if art “really” lives in the audience’s response, he’s going to rig the audience by making it himself. The move is slyly combative. He rejects the market logic that stalks most cultural production (likes, reviews, ticket sales, the warm bath of relatability) and replaces it with a stricter metric: does the work jolt the maker out of habit?

The subtext is less “I don’t care what you think” than “I don’t trust what you’ve been trained to think.” By casting himself as his own audience, Foreman isn’t retreating into solipsism; he’s manufacturing a controlled experiment. The “response” he’s after is not approval but disturbance. “Wake myself up” signals a suspicion that consciousness is anesthetized by routine narratives and theatrical comfort. It’s an aesthetic of interruption: art as an alarm clock, not a lullaby.

Context matters here. Foreman emerges from the downtown avant-garde, where theater is often built to resist easy consumption and to expose the machinery of attention itself. His Ontological-Hysteric style treats the stage like a mind under pressure: fractured images, competing signals, deliberate irritation. In that ecosystem, “audience” isn’t a demographic; it’s a battleground over perception.

The intent, then, is double-edged. He’s asserting artistic sovereignty while quietly admitting the inescapable social fact: even the most private art imagines a witness. Foreman simply chooses the most demanding one, and invites the rest of us to try keeping up.