"Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
“On the Level of Desire”, p. 194
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Not-Knowing%3A_The_Essays_and_Interviews_of_Donald_Barthelme
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
50 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme →
Related Quotes
"Beckett’s pessimism makes Greene’s pessimism look amateurish."
"Charm, as Goethe said, is the dead green bug on the golden leaf of occasion."
"To say that the publishing world is not interested in literature is to overstate it. They are extremely interested in…"
"I have said this too many times to make it interesting even to myself, but the principle of collage is one of the cen…"
"Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind."
"...he wouldn’t know what to do with a moral if handed one by the archangel Michael on a flaming sword."
"It is well to be simple once in a while."
"...there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical v…"
"Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentenc…"
"We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)"