Artistic Marginalization Quotes

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

The arts in America exist in spite of America, not because of America.

I personally have never trusted museums. ... It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s ... few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth.

Everywhere I go, I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter.

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system.

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived.

Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society.

Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he'll look at you as if you were a hummingbird. Dancers don't get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.

As a black artist in America, you know, it is so segregated as far as the radio goes and how they position music on the radio.