The South African artist has taken on a range of social justice issues in his sculpture, film and drawings. Now, he's tackling opera.  

Kentridge spoke with the NYPL Live's Paul Holdengraber about how he became an artist after failing as an actor and his Met Opera directoral debut of Shostakovich's The Nose, based on a short story by Russian author Nickolai Gogol.

Stream and download the talk here for free.

Bon Mots

On Film Technique: "It's finding out the rules of the form itself rather than knowing those rules - or devising those rules in advance."

On Gogol: "He invokes an enormous multitude of characters. Not by having thousands of characters in the story, but by allowing characters to emerge in a sub-clause of a sentence."

On Erring: "I think there's an enormous place for productive misunderstandings and productive mistranslations."