"Yes, the more I go through life I realize that there's really no separation between practice and art at all. The two things more and more become one rather than two different aspects of my life"
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Monk’s line quietly detonates one of Western art’s most cherished myths: that “art” is the glamorous, finished object and “practice” is the dutiful drudgery that leads there. Coming from a composer whose work lives in the body as much as on the page - voice, breath, gesture, repetition - the claim isn’t motivational poster wisdom. It’s a structural argument about where meaning is actually made.
The syntax does the cultural work. “Yes” answers an implied skeptic, someone invested in the hierarchy that crowns performance and buries preparation. “The more I go through life” frames the insight as earned, not theorized: time has taught her that the border was always artificial. When she says the two “become one,” she’s not describing a new technique so much as a new way of valuing labor. Practice stops being a backstage activity and becomes the artwork’s moral center: attention, discipline, the daily return.
The subtext is also a refusal of product culture. In a world that rewards premieres, releases, and the clean narrative of “genius,” Monk’s fusion of practice and art insists on process as a public stance. It’s especially resonant in experimental music, where the “result” can look deceptively simple while being built from years of embodied refinement. Her line repositions craft as ethos: if practice is art, then the artist isn’t someone who occasionally produces masterpieces, but someone who commits to a way of being - rigorous, iterative, alive to small change.
The syntax does the cultural work. “Yes” answers an implied skeptic, someone invested in the hierarchy that crowns performance and buries preparation. “The more I go through life” frames the insight as earned, not theorized: time has taught her that the border was always artificial. When she says the two “become one,” she’s not describing a new technique so much as a new way of valuing labor. Practice stops being a backstage activity and becomes the artwork’s moral center: attention, discipline, the daily return.
The subtext is also a refusal of product culture. In a world that rewards premieres, releases, and the clean narrative of “genius,” Monk’s fusion of practice and art insists on process as a public stance. It’s especially resonant in experimental music, where the “result” can look deceptively simple while being built from years of embodied refinement. Her line repositions craft as ethos: if practice is art, then the artist isn’t someone who occasionally produces masterpieces, but someone who commits to a way of being - rigorous, iterative, alive to small change.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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