Graham on tricks

What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience.

Graham on art

If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about art being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human.

...it's good art if it consistently affects humans in a certain way.
...Since there's such a thing as good art, there's also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognize it.

So the most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try to make it.

Graham on how not to die

...if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. ...and you don't get that kind of money just by asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.

Ebert on Bamboozled

That's the danger with satire: To ridicule something, you have to show it, and if what you're attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it.