Top 30 Martine Syms Quotes

I have said it before and I will continue to say that I don’t think art is the most effective form of protest. I don’t think it changes policy; I think it changes discourse, and discourse can change ideas, and for me, that’s what it’s about: having that space for conversation.

I played sports growing up, and I worked out a lot. Then, when I moved back to L.A., I just fell off everything.

I definitely think an on-screen experience is universal, in a way.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

I had a studio visitor ask me when a piece was complete, and afterward, I realized I was kind of annoyed by the question. I wrote down to myself, ‘Nothing’s ever finished’ as an operating value.

I’m so voracious with books, movies, TV, and I’m always interested in the way that different cultural values are presented or, in their absence, are present.

At some point, all black movies became biopics. All the good, serious ones became biopics. ‘Ray,’ ‘Ali’… those types of movies, those are the opportunities available for mostly men. Those are the opportunities for a black actor to transcend ‘black’ movies. They have to play a black icon.

I’m really obsessed with this show right now called ‘Power,’ produced by 50 Cent.

One of my early memories is of a white girl twirling in a circle. I realized later on that it was from that show ‘Small Wonder’ – the oldest I could have been when I was watching it was four or five, but it’s one I think about a lot. It’s stuck in my head, this terrible Fox television show.

Growing up in a specific area has a certain sociological and economic reason, so I’m interested in using myself as a case study to look as those things.

Pop culture or advertising doesn’t work perfectly. No one is watching and mindlessly accepting every part of the narrative or ideology.

I think the sitcom is the format for television. It’s the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.

My writing, it’s mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

I think the medium or format of distributing things has its own characteristics. I think that an exhibition can communicate certain things that a video can’t, and publications communicate that in a different way.

It’s very comforting to feel myself getting stronger.

There’s no reason to be ashamed of feeling good.

I grew up in Los Angeles. I watched lots of television; I still watch lots of television.

Entrepreneurs create value; I wanted to create ideas that became machines for making value.

I grew up in Altadena, California.

I never understood why anyone cared about the Kardashians until a friend, who’s Latina, told me that she liked them because they’re a family who look like hers. I was able to appreciate them differently.

I’ve always been interested in the manufacturing of narratives, identities, and ideologies, and how they are embodied and negotiated by viewers.

I grew up watching tons and tons of television. It was all I would do, especially during summer vacations.

My mum was very interested in art and liked to write, and my dad was a hobbyist photographer.

When I’m working on something, even when I don’t know exactly where it’s going, I have a sense of what I’d like to make. So maybe doing things right is following that sense even when I stop trusting myself. The rightness is in the process, even if it doesn’t match up with my plans.

There’s an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you’ve been somewhere or you know something when you really don’t.

My family, my background… it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

A lot of my work, the subject is film and television itself, and history, and how that kind of coincides with larger cultural history and memory.

Los Angeles is an uncanny place to live. It has many science fiction qualities. For example, when I’m standing in line at the supermarket and I recognise the person in front of me, but I can’t figure out how I know them. Suddenly, I realise I saw them in some random commercial six years ago.

I think of entrepreneurship as a way of creating value.

Representation is a sort of surveillance.