Life & Wisdom Quote by Ann Macbeth

The blunt, almost ungrammatical urgency of Ann Macbeth's line feels less like a polished aphorism than a dispatch from the trenches of cultural production. "Any new producer starting up is to get investors' confidence" reads like someone thinking out loud under pressure: the first job isn't art, it's credibility. Macbeth makes the arts economy sound like a border crossing where the passport is other people's trust.

The repetition in "very very wary" is the tell. It's not rhetorical flourish; it's exasperation. Wary of what, exactly? Not only financial loss, but the perceived intangibility of artistic value. Macbeth is naming an old prejudice that still hangs around: art is capricious, artists are unreliable, audiences are fickle, and returns can't be spreadsheeted into certainty. Investors, by contrast, want frictionless narratives and measurable risk. The arts offer neither.

Context sharpens the edge. Macbeth lived through industrial expansion, World War I, and the interwar period, when patronage models were shifting and mass production was reshaping craft and design. As new cultural enterprises tried to professionalize, they ran into a marketplace that treated the arts as decorative rather than infrastructural. Her wording makes "confidence" the real commodity; the art is almost secondary.

The subtext is a warning and a strategy memo: if you want new work to exist, you have to translate it into a language capital recognizes. That translation costs something, and Macbeth seems to know it.