How Does Art Work?

“It’s the way my 2-year-old laughs when he hears Peppa Pig.

Or the joy that my 4-year-old daughter gets playing My Little Pony while she’s horseback riding, and my 12-year-old gets from Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé–women I’m proud to see inspiring others with their self-expression. My 17-year-old tells me Luke Bryan is the bomb, while my 20-year-old is in European museums of her own volition. (The only museum I was interested in at 20 was a nightclub.) My wife finds it in the work of great designers, especially Alexander McQueen. I like the art by those French boys, the Lumières, and that American, Edison. I’ve always found art to be at its best when shared. I’m the Frank Capra of art appreciation: I love it when we all cheer.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN

CO-FOUNDER OF THE WEINSTEIN CO. AND THE ACADEMY AWARD–WINNING PRODUCER OF MANY PLAYS AND FILMS

“Art can change the way we look at the world.

It can reveal a certain beauty or truth, and it definitely is a disruption, a disturbance or a moment of epiphany where we pause and our view of everything else changes.

I had a great art teacher in primary school, and I remember her teaching method was to stimulate creative thinking by showing us so much art, even if it was in books and reproductions. Today the Internet provides incredible access to sites worldwide, but I think that art is an unmediated experience–the one-on-one moment with a great work of art.

KLAUS BIESENBACH

DIRECTOR, MOMA PS1, AND CHIEF CURATOR AT LARGE, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY

“Theater has the potential to break through binaries, to bring us into a world of ambiguity and paradox.

To unlock positional thinking, to shatter taboos, to disrupt the normal patterns of our brain. Art has the power to explode the heart and open up other energetic capacities to reperceive. It defies boundaries and leaps tall buildings. It transports, it translates, it transcends. Transcendence is so important right now because our lives are so mechanized, controlled and commodified; art has the capacity to open our souls and could be our revolutionary, evolutionary salvation.

EVE ENSLER

PLAYWRIGHT, ACTIVIST AND THE FOUNDER OF V-DAY AND ONE BILLION RISING