Art & Creativity Quote by Julie Taymor

Taymor is calling out a quiet sleight of hand in modern storytelling: when images arrive pre-loaded with “the right” music, our feelings stop being discovered and start being triggered. “Program” is the tell. It’s a tech word, not an art word, implying an engineered response rather than an earned one. The line lands because it frames scoring as behavioral design: pair a swelling chord with a tearful close-up often enough and audiences learn the shortcut. They don’t feel; they recognize the cue.

The bite is in “desensitized,” which sounds like a moral diagnosis but is really a critique of overuse. Taymor isn’t anti-music; she’s protective of it. In theater and film, music can be a second text, adding contradiction, irony, or interiority. But when it’s used like sonic underlining, it becomes emotional auto-correct, smoothing out ambiguity and making every beat legible in the same familiar key. That’s how a culture of constant scoring can flatten the audience’s threshold for surprise: silence starts to feel like absence instead of tension, and subtle performance reads as “nothing’s happening” unless it’s being sonically annotated.

Context matters because Taymor’s work (stage-to-screen, mythic scale, bold visual symbolism) depends on viewers doing interpretive labor. She wants the image to hold its own, and the music to complicate, not instruct. The subtext is almost a dare: if artists keep pre-chewing emotion, audiences will forget how to taste.