Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Barzun

Barzun’s line gives “self-promotion” a moral makeover. Not permission, but obligation: the artist doesn’t merely get to show the work; he owes it to the work to push it into view. The sly power sits in that parenthetical escalation - “one may even say a duty” - which takes a practice often treated as vulgar (advertising yourself, courting attention, making noise) and reframes it as stewardship. The artist becomes less a self-aggrandizer than a responsible custodian of whatever has been made.

The subtext is a rebuke to a certain genteel posture: the romantic fantasy that real talent should be discovered, that quality naturally rises, that the worthy can remain aloof. Barzun, the lifelong educator and cultural historian, knew better. Institutions are crowded, gatekeepers are fallible, and public memory is short. If you don’t place the work where it can be encountered, you’re not preserving purity; you’re cooperating with oblivion. “Prominently” matters here: he’s not endorsing mere availability but insisting on presence - the strategic, sometimes uncomfortable work of insisting that art deserves space.

Contextually, Barzun wrote across a century when mass media, universities, and cultural industries increasingly mediated what counted as “serious” culture. His claim is almost democratic: art can’t do its cultural job from the drawer. Visibility is not vanity; it’s how a private act becomes a public good.